Category: Uncategorised

BooksWeLike seems now to be entirely dead. Pity. I guess

Library Thing

is now occupying much the same space, and better. Still, I have a bunch of reviews in there, and it’s always sad to see sites vanish when you turn your back for a couple of years. Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess.

“Heute abend findet am Berliner Hauptbahnhof so etwas wie ein Flash Mop statt.”

[maybe it’s how you clean up after a flash flood?

Anybody remember the benches in

Transmetropolitan

, that heated themselves overnight to stop people sleeping on them? Somewhere in China has gone one step further:

Park officials in China have found a way to stop people from hogging their benches for too long – by fitting steel spikes on a coin-operated timer.

If visitors at the Yantai Park in Shangdong province, eastern China, linger too long without feeding the meter, dozens of sharp spikes shoot through the seat.

[Caution about the limited reliability of ‘funny old world’ type stories about China, of course]

Just been to a RHPS showing. Remain somewhat astonished by how unknown it is in Berlin; it’s the kind of import you would expect to be overdeveloped here compared to its condition in country of origin. Not so.

Still, even here it has the makings of a secular ritual. The music, the comforting ritual, the morality almost as screwy as the Old Testament. Or maybe that’s just me

Once again, Rhian speaks truth about the silliness of intergenerational warfare, which IMO is only one step above blaming immigrants for everything.

I am indescribably hard-pushed to feel a shred of sympathy for any ‘generation’ I might be part of. My generation is wildly overprivileged, entitled, solipsistic and drowning in conspicuous consumption, and the majority of us have done absolutely nothing but take what we have for granted.

Looking through the treatment of comics in the UK parliament, I find (unsurprisingly) that MPs care little and know less. But go back to 1955, and you find this brilliant rant from a young Labour MP, making a (successful) attempt to ban “horror comics”:

it is the glorification of violence, the educating of children in the detail of every conceivable crime, the playing on sadism, the morbid stimulation of sex, the cultivation of race hatred, the cultivation of contempt for work, the family and authority, and, probably most unhealthy, the cultivation of the idea of the superman and a sort of incipient Fascism.

Turns out, this was just a pale reflection of all-out hysteria in the US aroudn the same time, complete with burnings of comics.

Alan Moore:

I’m interested in the superhero in real life, but not the comic book version. I’ve had some distancing thoughts about them recently. I’ve come to the conclusion that what superheroes might be — in their current incarnation, at least — is a symbol of American reluctance to involve themselves in any kind of conflict without massive tactical superiority. I think this is the same whether you have the advantage of carpet bombing from altitude or if you come from the planet Krypton as a baby and have increased powers in Earth’s lower gravity. That’s not what superheroes meant to me when I was a kid. To me, they represented a wellspring of the imagination. Superman had a dog in a cape! He had a city in a bottle! It was wonderful stuff for a seven-year-old boy to think about. But I suspect that a lot of superheroes now are basically about the unfair fight. You know: people wouldn’t bully me if I could turn into the Hulk.

One of many, many things to love about British comics is their uneasy relationship with the idea of the superhero. Alan Moore:

. I’ve come to the conclusion that what superheroes might be — in their current incarnation, at least — is a symbol of American reluctance to involve themselves in any kind of conflict without massive tactical superiority. I think this is the same whether you have the advantage of carpet bombing from altitude or if you come from the planet Krypton as a baby and have increased powers in Earth’s lower gravity. That’s not what superheroes meant to me when I was a kid. To me, they represented a wellspring of the imagination. Superman had a dog in a cape! He had a city in a bottle! It was wonderful stuff for a seven-year-old boy to think about. But I suspect that a lot of superheroes now are basically about the unfair fight. You know: people wouldn’t bully me if I could turn into the Hulk.. I’ve come to the conclusion that what superheroes might be — in their current incarnation, at least — is a symbol of American reluctance to involve themselves in any kind of conflict without massive tactical superiority. I think this is the same whether you have the advantage of carpet bombing from altitude or if you come from the planet Krypton as a baby and have increased powers in Earth’s lower gravity. That’s not what superheroes meant to me when I was a kid. To me, they represented a wellspring of the imagination. Superman had a dog in a cape! He had a city in a bottle! It was wonderful stuff for a seven-year-old boy to think about. But I suspect that a lot of superheroes now are basically about the unfair fight. You know: people wouldn’t bully me if I could turn into the Hulk.

This isn’t new (is anything?). Distrust of superheroes, for example, formed a minor part of the postwar public hysteria over “horror comics“. Here’s a particularly OTT rant from a young Labour MP, in full-throated

think of the children

populism:

it is the glorification of violence, the educating of children in the detail of every conceivable crime, the playing on sadism, the morbid stimulation of sex, the cultivation of race hatred, the cultivation of contempt for work, the family and authority, and, probably most unhealthy, the cultivation of the idea of the superman and a sort of incipient Fascism.

The fact that Superman had been denounced as Jewish by Goebbels didn’t seem to stop this, nor did the broader Jewish context to superhero comics.

Those denunciations aren’t in themselves all that interesting; more compelling is the history of British comics toying with these ideas, deconstructing and critiquing the superhero rather than ignoring him. This has been one of the main occupations of British comics from the 80s onwards. Here’s Grant Morrison talking it up as national source of pride:

Sick, ironic humour is very cool here. People are poor, drunk and vibrant with twisted creative energy. Taboo-smashing is an artistic pasttime that’s become almost passe….It’s no surprise we’ve produced so many spiky, brilliant, politically-motivated creators like Pat Mills, Garth Ennis, Jamie Delano or Warren Ellis. Alan Moore, Mark Millar and I are almost unique among our peers in our genuine fondness for American superhero characters. Otherwise, British writers pretty much HATE superheroes to a man, preferring ultraviolent soldiers, hi-tech vigilantes or kid gangs. In the saccharine world of 80s mainstream US titles it’s probably easy to see in hindsight why the British Invasion of the 80s and 90s was so invigorating.

In a chart of changes over the last decade, this must be the most impressive:



Books published in 2000 in the US:

282,000


Books published in 2010 in the US:

1,053,000

[[Britain](http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jul/27/dale-farm-essex-travellers-eviction)]:

Dale Farm is the largest Romany Gypsy and Irish Traveller site in the UK, and part of it is due for demolition.

A number of Gypsies and Travellers have lived at Dale Farm entirely legally since the 1960s. Over the years, more families came to join them after councils began shutting down public sites and Travellers were forced to look for permanent places to settle.

France:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday (28 July) announced his government is to order police to round up allegedly illegal migrants of Roma ethnicity for expulsion from French territory and destroy their encampments.

The announcement was the result of a cabinet meeting dedicated to the subject called after officers shot and killed a gypsy youth in the Loire Valley, provoking a riot by others of his community.