Blue Lines Revisited: Archive

judge dredd mt rushmore! hard to believe you've not done this one before, though.

This is pretty hard, because I tend to think of Dredd more in terms of phases rather than individual stories, but also because most of the stories I HAVE read since about 2000 have been the big individual (graphic-novelised) sagas. BUT I haven’t read eg Day of Chaos yet, so I’m not up to date.

But I’ll have a go. BTW I’m going to exclude the stuff written by my brother from consideration here, so my judgement is unsullied by family ties ;)

THE JUDGE CHILD QUEST: As a kid we had the Titan Books editions of the main Dredd sagas - Cursed Earth, Apocalypse War, Judge Child - we didn’t have The Day The Law Died but a friend did. I had to pick one, it was almost the Apocalypse War, which is a proper story (unlike the disconnected travelogue of Judge Child) but for wonder and pleasure Judge Child wins. As a demonstration of the scope of the Dredd Universe, it’s unbeatable, and it starts and ends very well - the grotesquerie of Faro The Garbage God at one end, the inexorable Western-style executions of the doomed Angels at the other. In between, so much to enjoy: “That damned moustache!”; “Shake hands with the Thing From The Pit”; McMahon’s drawing of the exploded planet-thing; “Two aliens have entered the battlefield!”, and even one of Wagner/Grant’s verse stories that’s actually bearable. Add on the epilogue with Dredd on the streets while his fate is decided by the Council of Five, just to tie a bow on it.

UNCLE UMP’S UMPTY CANDY: One of the classic early years one-parters, the one with the absurdly addictive sweets. To be honest, this is a stand in for about fifty stories published in the early 80s, especially in that relatively happy (for Mega City One) time between Cal and the Apocalypse War. What I like about these short stories isn’t just their craft - satire, action and a good gag or two in six pages, week-in week-out - but the overall sense of Dredd in what he might consider his prime, before the losses started mounting up and the doubts set in. Portrait of the Judge as a Young Man - one who enjoys his job, banters with his colleagues, rolls his eyes at the citizens… it’s as close to a stable, sympathetic environment as a comic with a fascist protagonist ever really gets. The Complete Case Files 3-6-ish are probably where you want to look for these, I don’t know exactly which stories are in what.

THE DEAD MAN: The actual story of the Dead Man is slow but fine, this is only really in here for having THE great Dredd Universe revise-everything-you-know-RIGHT-NOW-EARTHLET cliffhanger. I bought it when it came out. I probably squeaked. And, er, I’ve sort of spoiled it just by its inclusion in a Dredd Mt Rushmore.

BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY: I simply haven’t read enough of what you might call Late Dredd to make a call on the best one, so instead here’s a highlight of what you might call Middle Dredd, or Dredd: The Procedural Years - it was this or The Pit, which is fantastic (Dredd takes over an underperforming Sector House - hijinks ensure), but this one has the gloriously creepy and awful Judge Roffman in it, one of those foils who, once he’s appeared, you can’t believe a series ever managed without.

Jun 18, 20131 note

The Oasis Moment

ajohnny replied to your quote: “[Oasis] ruined British music and they ruined…

what does this even mean though? the first part I can gather, but the second?

Fair point! It has a kind of emotional resonance because I remember going from a devoted reader of the UK press to zero at some point during the ‘96-‘97 reign of Gallagher terror. So obviously *I* thought they ruined it but I don’t really recall why, aside from “too much Oasis and too much shit that sounds like Oasis”.

My feeling is that the fanbase Oasis materialised felt like a huge huge opportunity for the music press, and they enthusiastically chased it, and then it turned out that while Oasis was a thing, most Oasis fans really weren’t the type of fans who wanted to buy “music journalism” unless it was literally all about Oasis. Something about being an Oasis fan, and curiosity, didn’t usually go hand in hand (though of course there were tons of exceptions).

And in 96-97 or so this really wasnt a problem for the music press, because Oasis were SO BIG that you could have marketed Oasis-themed anteaters to their fans and even a teeny tiny percentage buying them would have made your anteater business very wealthy. But once that bubble burst and Oasis’ fanbase dropped to more reasonable proportions the press realised it had made a strategic error?

It could be simpler of course and just about the Be Here Now incident, which was not a glorious day for the British press, but I think it realised that very quickly and has guarded against overhype since.

Or actually it could be even simpler. Before Oasis we had two weekly magazines covering mostly new music. Now we have one, and it has Jim Morrison and John Lennon and all sorts of dead old dudes on the cover. But we do have two lads’ weeklies which didn’t exist pre-Oasis. (And it can’t all be an internet thing because while you can get music free on the Internet you can most certainly also get boobs and sport free too.)

I’m putting up a blog post tomorrow about Oasis and their impact, FWIW. (Hence my tracking down that Deller quote in the first place.)

Jun 18, 201311 notes

“[Oasis] ruined British music and they ruined British music journalism” —artist Jeremy Deller, interviewed in Mojo last year.

Jun 18, 201310 notes

#harsh words #not entirely wrong words

“It’s an unctuous record, with a naked craving for respect. But perhaps it only looks that way because, well, it worked.”

Jun 18, 20138 notes

#popular #uk number ones

“Unaware but underlined I figured out the story
It wasn’t good
(crucifixion)
But in the corner of my mind I celebrated glory
But that was not to be
(resurrection of the king / it not mattering to a non-repentant person)
In the twist of separation you excelled in being free
Can’t you find a little room inside for me
(room inside heaven)” —

I MUST NOT CHECK SONGMEANINGS.NET WHEN WRITING.

I MUST NOT CHECK SONGMEANINGS.NET WHEN WRITING,

Jun 18, 201312 notes

Jun 17, 201310 notes

“Hurry up with my damn croissants” —

I really hate this line and its impending memeification at the hands of over-entitled dudes yelling at under-paid serving staff and thinking it makes them hilarious. It kind of half-works in song because “I Am A God” is all frustrated little man syndrome impotence but Kanye’s knowingness isn’t enough to stop me either picturing bankers being wankers to baristas or to stop them from doing it. (via alexmacpherson)

Yeah… my very very VERY early impression of Yeezus is that it’s a record that’s brutally honest about power and wealth, the day-to-day workings of power (the ways in which KW is powerful, the ways in which he isn’t and isn’t allowed to be). And its visceral appeal is part of that, the direct emotional transmission of that - this has always been the appeal of ‘heavy’ music of course, it’s horrible and exciting because power is horrible and exciting.

At a gut level I think it’s important that a record like that is widely heard at this moment in history, when the trappings of legitimacy around power are more threadbare and unneccessary than they have been in decades. But then I have to ask myself, why do I think it’s important? I remember reading people back in the 80s who were really into Swans, say, and it seemed like there was a moral high ground or maybe even enlightenment to be gained by being into this music which was Unflinching and Truthful. Not that Yeezus is as single-minded or unintentionally comical as old Swans, but there’s some sort of similar “DON’T LOOK AWAY” impulse in there. And I ended up laughing at Swans because I was frightened of them. But even so twenty years on I suspect the people who flinched and the people who didn’t and the people who never listened in the first place are in the same boat.

I am reading Scott Aaronson’s Quantum Computing Since Democritus at the moment, which amongst other things is reminding me how rusty my pure maths brain is. It’s unsettling reading a book written in a breezy bloggy style about the intersection of compsci and physics (the two things I have actual degrees in), and then get pulled up short when I actually have to slowly reason my way through a quickly stated proof.

This need to grind through some system 2 thinking did trigger off a half-formed thought about a couple of the ideas I have a problem with in philosophy of mind (and AI in particular). The first of these ideas is that thinking is essentially conscious manipulation of symbols. The second is that the working of the mind is potentially entirely transparent to introspection on the part of the thinker.

Now, the theoretical computer scientists and philosophers who spend their time thinking about AI are exactly the sort of people whose entire occupations consist of expounding very deliberate, slow, logical arguments at each other. If you are trained to do this, then there is likely a general bias towards thinking that the important business of the mind is that self-same slow, logical, system 2 conscious consideration of ideas.

So, it’s interesting to me that both the above ideas fit rather neatly with that bias. If you spend much of your time sitting there logically working your way through a proof by manipulating symbols, then of course thinking looks like that. Similarly, if you value conscious thought far above unconscious then you are much more likely to regard thought processes as being susceptible to introspective investigation.

At work when we talk about Kahneman’s stuff we often get asked “Are some people System 1 and some System 2?” (a la left-brain, right-brain) or actually it’s simply assumed that by marketers that of course the customers of Our Darling Brand have made deliberate conscious choices in favour of it, etc.

So we added a few mental maths problems - the ones Kahneman includes in the book, like the Bat & Ball and Lilypad questions - into a standard omnibus survey, and therefore got a robust representative sample answering said questions, and the ONLY group (by age, gender, ethnicity, profession, education level, anything) to score significantly better on these System 2 questions were…. male computing/IT professionals.

Jun 16, 201321 notes

Plastic Yielding of An Edge Cracked Section in the Presence of Shear: Amazon.co.uk: D.J.F. Ewing, J.N. Swingler: Books

I recently discovered that my own Dad (who is a fine Dad) has a load of books auto-listed on Amazon - all the engineering papers and reports he published when he worked for the then-nationalised electricity industries in the 70s and 80s. I am not really competent to assess their contents but this, at least, has the best title.

Jun 16, 20138 notes

#my dad #knife b-sides

Cultural Dads

Before I became a Dad I was really sure and hopeful that I wasn’t going to be the kind of Dad who spends his time pushing his taste - music, films, books, whatever - on his kids. At the same time my own memories of being a kid are a string of disconnected experiences and moods and a lot of the good experiences were cultural. For better or (often) for worse you draw on your own childhood a lot when you’re a parent, so that stuff is what I know.

So inevitably there’s certain daydreams you have about reading this particular book or watching this certain film with your kid, and ultimately the urge to Pass On Your Wisdom is timeless even if now “your wisdom” is about Clash albums rather than snaring a mammoth.

Jun 16, 201333 notes

cureforbedbugs:

Tom writes “It’s obviously my Mark Pitchfork day cos I also bought Vision Creation Newsun!” — Now THAT’S what I call 2002!

Pretty sure I bought Vision Creation Newsun in 2002 via Pitchfork (and likely Mark’s recommendation, too, though not this one). Did it show up on their albums of 2000 list or something? Was there a column about it

The curious sequel to this is that I waited 10 years to play it!

Jun 16, 20134 notes

Jun 14, 20136 notes

Ouch Monkeys The Teardrop Explodes

On the train home tonight I idly considered pitching a Teardrop Explodes week to One Week One Band. But a few moments reflection made me realise I actually had almost nothing to say about them. They came, they took drugs, they made music, it’s all there on the records.

Some psychedelia is very layered and deep, ritualistic even, designed as ritual music has always been to accompany various forms of action and exploration. Other psychedelic music is - it seems to me - more like a travel diary, a beautiful record of strange things uncovered and sketched: full of surface textures and unusual ideas. The Teardrop Explodes were more of the second kind of group, despite Julian Cope’s obvious later interest in the first kind of activity.

Almost everything in this song is surface - the lyrics are eerily evocative but in the kind of ways that interpretation damages; the sound-world is creepy and beautiful but there’s nothing you won’t get on first listen. It is what it is. It’s really good, though. When this album came out in 1990 - cobbled together from a third Teardrops LP abandoned 8 years prior - I remember a guest singles reviewer in NME angrily denying that one of its tracks could possibly have been made in 1982: it must be a more recent put-on. And this song sounded still more unexpected, a transmission from some rotting, ancient alien rainforest, both very old and hard to catch up to.

Jun 13, 20139 notes

Does Whatever An Iron Can

It makes me happy when I scroll down and see posts from both Kieron Gillen, writer of Iron Man*, and isabelthespy, greatest critic of Iron Man**.

*the comic
**the film(s)

“Twenty Two Comic Books Alan Moore Is Looking Forward To This Year” (Part 2 of 2)

From the interview with Mark Thompson printed in Amazing Heroes #145, 1988

12. “Nemo”, edited by Rick Marschall

13. “Eddy Current”, by Ted McKeever

14.“Taboo”, edited by …

This (and the previous half of the list) is such a memory rush back to the World Of Comics As Once I Knew It. I think the only thing on this list I never read is Mr Monster (I may also not actually have read the Carol Lay book but it’s the kind of cover that stays with you).

An amazing comics moment captured here - a mix of hardy underground survivors, an open-to-ideas mainstream, the best of the B&W boom, and new wavers both established and breaking through. And Cerebus, obviously. About the only things I remember as critical indie darlings which aren’t on the list were Tales Of The Beanworld, Zot! and Nexus.

Zot and Nexus are, of course, also kinda sorta superhero books, and this being Alan Moore in 1988 it’s very much a “I am NOT just a SUPERHERO GUY” positioning statement, but also a list put together by a writer who is aware he has a wide and respectful audience and wants to educate them a little. I may have read this list, more likely I just absorbed the names a bit later from the comics. music and style press, but this was also (of course) an amazing time to be an inquisitive teenager into comics, and a couple of years later when I did jump from the nascent Vertigo comics into the independent scene this list might as well have been my guide.

Jun 13, 20138 notes

“I love how Kanye is so wildly, declaratively ambitious and inventive and pioneering and forward-thinking and broad-minded and in the end what he cares most about is winning more Grammys. That’d be like some self-professed great chef aspiring to get a sandwich on the McDonald’s menu.” —

Sorry, work head on here. Kanye is pretty good at marketing, yes, and pre-release campaigns are the new music videos (or something), though how many of them make a success of records which wouldn’t have been highly anticipated anyhow?

(via tomewing)

A great point. Music-as-design/advertising/brand isn’t done “on spec” like marketing for other (aspirational) consumer goods frequently is, but happens after the music(ian) is already established? Related to Tom’s music video comparison, how many “event” music videos broke a star, rather than reaffirmed said star’s starriness?

(via marathonpacks)

The one that jumps to mind is “Take On Me”, back in the 80s - I don’t think anyone knew/cared about a-Ha before that video (and no doubt they fell back into obscurity in the US, but they were properly boyband big here).

Actually the best “break-a-star” pre-release marketing I can remember was an 80s thing too - Tiffany’s “shopping malls” tour, it was the only thing anyone knew or knew to write about her and it really helped define her image. It was then ripped off by everybody, IIRC.

(Pre-release marketing trickery is powerful whether it can or can’t break anyone, of course. I don’t doubt the publicity created by the Daft Punk campaign made the difference between it selling 200k and 400k in its first week.)

Jun 12, 201349 notes