Seizing the Memes of Production
If consolidating content is cool, you can call me Miles Davis
I’ve been wondering if there’s any value in me doing a newsletter. I’d sort of let my personal website updates lapse for a while, in part because I was posting so much on social media sites as well as my regular blogging on BoingBoing (plus work, and kid, and band practice, and sleep, and Andor, and whatever else is going on). The recent news that an Elongated Muskrat has colonized Twitter to turn into a cess pool for crypto profits was a good enough impetus for me to get off my ass and finally try to make this happen (plus, it’ll make my content for the aforementioned personal website).
My plan here is basically to make this a weekly newsletter, rounding up all the things I’ve been working on, and offering a few other recommendations along the way. Hopefully, I’ll get it out at the same time every week, at least once I figure out the ideal rhythm and timing for that. Maybe I’ll serialize some fiction, or offer some other bonus content? We’ll see!
(The name, by the way, comes from this song by the Weakerthans, which is also where I got the name for my LLC and record label.)
What I’m Writing
This past week, I broke the outline for a new podcast I’m doing for Badlands from Double Elvis Productions, and got about 2200 words into the script. I’ve done a handful of these before, including episodes on Armie Hammer and Robin Williams and another one that’s out in a few weeks. I can’t talk specifics about this new one yet, but it is pretty unconventional, even for Badlands. Which makes it a fun challenge!
I made some good progress on some Wirecutter work as well, though I’ll wait to share it once it’s actually published.
Meanwhile, at BoingBoing…
How Fox News controls the conversation at every midterm election
Your car's automated safety features are probably making driving less safe
New study: Fish can get addicted to meth after eating human poop
50 years later, FBI finally IDs murder victim known as "Lady of the Dunes"
A Holocaust-themed production of Romeo & Juliet forgot about Jewish actors
What I’m Reading
I’m still making my way through Alan Moore’s Illuminations. The prose in this book is just so damn luscious, and it’s an interesting mix of stories. The ones I love, I adore, and the other ones still make for fascinating fiction experiments that are worth reading anyway. It’s also — in true Alan Moore fashion — a very dense read. And sometimes, my brain is just not prepared to digest something so nutrient-rich (especially with a sick kiddo this week).
So, when I need a break from Illuminations, I’ve been reading Alan Moore’s Miracleman comics. This week I got through volume one, A Dream of Flying, and volume two, The Red King Syndrome, and only just started volume three, Olympus, which is where things get really weird. I wasn’t familiar with Miracleman before this; and in fact, when Marvel announced a few years back that they’d bought the rights to the character and would be reprinting the 80s comics and potentially creating new ones as well, I simply did not understand the hype. Miracleman isn’t spoken of with the same reverence as other Moore books like Watchmen and V For Vendetta. But this recent article by Sam Thielman convinced me to give Miracleman a try … and holy crap, I do not regret it. It is truly a fantastic “What if superheroes were real?” story, though not in the ways that everyone has tried to tell that story in the decades since Miracleman was published. It’s not just grimdark and edgy — it deals with things like childbirth, and parenting, and nuclear weapons, and thinks in depth about what would happen if there was an actual super human with incomparable powers. Superman can’t disarm the entire planet because then there wouldn’t be any more Superman comics. But Miracleman can — though whether or not that’s a good thing is a question that will plague you, me, and him for a long time.
A brief Miracleman history for those unfamiliar, and also because I think it’s hilarious to try and type these words out:
After DC Comics began publishing Superman, other companies came up with their own übermensches to try and compete. Fawcett Comics introduced Captain Marvel, aka Shazam, which quickly became more popular than Superman. DC sued Fawcett for copyright infringement, but the legal battle dragged on for a while. In the meantime, a British publisher called L. Miller & Sons began publishing reprints of the Shazam Captain Marvel. Eventually, DC won their lawsuit, which Fawcett could no longer publish Captain Marvel — which left L. Miller & Sons in a pickle. So they quickly created Marvelman as a blatant knockoff of Captain Marvel that they could continue publishing without concern about rights or losing readership. (Case in point: instead of transforming when he says the word “Shazam!”, Marvelman’s magic word is “atomic” but backwards). Eventually, that company shutters, and Marvel decides to cash in on that sweet trademark and publish their own Captain Marvel comic, which also features a super-powered hero who transforms his body through fantastical means (in this case, bracelets instead of a magic word). Some 15 years later, another British publisher bought the rights to Marvelman and hired Alan Moore to rejuvenate the brand … but things got complicated again when they tried to publish the Marvelman reboot in the US, thanks to Marvel. So they renamed Marvelman into Miracleman. The US publisher, Eclipse Comics, went bankrupt in 1994, shortly after Neil Gaiman took over writing duties on Miracleman, and the book and character were left in legal limbo until 2013, when Marvel bought the rights to Miracleman (who used to be Marvelman, but had to change his name, because of Marvel).
Bonus irony: shortly after publication of Miracleman, DC Comics eventually bought the rights to the entire Charlton Comics catalog, and brought in Alan Moore to reinvigorate a few of those characters including Peacemaker, Blue Beetle, The Question, and Captain Atom … which eventually turned into Watchmen. Which, in addition to being a great comic, was also the first of many instances where the comic book publishing industry would totally fuck over Alan Moore. Comics, everybody!
Also speaking of comics, this week’s X-Men Red #8 was an absolute banger as always. I mean, it was probably the weakest issue of the series so far only because it was all about lining up pieces and setting things up for the big confrontation … but also, this is probably one of my favorite X-Men runs of all time, so the weakest link is still pretty effing awesome.
What I’m Watching
We finished The Midnight Club on Netflix, which was fine. Not Mike Flanagan’s best work, but enjoyable nonetheless (although the finale was a bit abrupt). The biggest flaw in the show is unfortunately also an intrinsic part of the show’s design. The basic premise here is a group of dying teenagers in a hospice home, who gather every night at midnight to tell scary stories. So half of every episode focuses on the teens, and a potential mystery haunting the hospice home, while the other half is a dramatization of whatever spooky story one of them tells this week. It’s fun! Unfortunately, as enjoyable as those one-off scary stories are, they really mess with the momentum of the “real world” storyline.
After that, we started watching The Watcher on Netflix. This show is fine to have in the background while I read Miracleman, but that’s the only really positive thing that I can say about it.
Finally, there’s Andor, which is quite possibly my favorite piece of Star Wars-related content maybe ever. It’s just a fantastic political thriller that really engages with the complications and nuances of politics and revolution. It’s also one of the best dramatic examples I’ve ever seen that illustrates the idea that all cops are bastards — not necessarily because they themselves are evil (though some are), but because their job is to uphold the laws of an evil system. Mild spoilers for the first episode, but the because thrust of this show is that a pair of racist cops harassed an immigrant (Rogue One’s Cassian Andor) outside of a brothel, and the immigrant fought back and ended up killing them. The lazy police chief wants to sweep it all under the rug — make a story that paints these racist cops as tragic fallen heroes, and move on, so no one has to hear about the brothels and the racism. But then there’s the ambitious young cop, who doesn’t want to lie, and wants to bring this copkiller to justice. In his zealous pursuit of this “murderous” immigrant “criminal,” that ambitious young cop causes even more problems for everyone. Yes, the ambitious young cop is arguably doing the “right” thing and upholding the law … which means bringing Imperial Stormtroopers down to kill more innocent people. Oops.
What I’m Singing
My kid was home sick this week, but I had a little free time during his nap one day to finish mixing and polishing a demo of a song I’ve been working on. It’s called “Scotty Says,” and it’s about a friend of mine who passed away ten years ago this month. The full band has played this song live exactly one time so far, and I put this demo together with a robo-drummer based on what we’ve been doing with it so far, so I can hear it all back and tweak what we need before we actually record it. I think the arrangement’s coming pretty well!
I also posted a new song from my Celtic Punk solo project, Ní Neart Go Cur Le Chéile, for Bandcamp Friday. This one’s an electrified version of “Whiskey In The Jar,” with fiddle work by Jacqui Cheng (who also played for the version of the song that appeared on my last Irish folk album Forfocséic, Vol. 2: Whiskey & Work):
What I’m Listening To
The new remix of The Beatles’ Revolver is pretty cool. The story of how they put it together is even cooler.
The Mountain Goats put out a new live-in-studio session for Bandcamp Friday that I’m also digging.
Somehow, I only just discovered The Stereo, despite the band featuring members of the Impossibles (a band I loved in high school, and who taught me a lot of weird music theory tricks), and also being named by Alternative Press as one of the most influential groups of ‘99. This is exactly the kind of power-pop I eat right up; how did I sleep on this until now? (I suspect the answer to that lies somewhere in the band’s new podcast about why they were never successful.)
Here are the rest of my top listens this week, according to last.fm:
What I’m Doing
Idunno man but I’m tryin’ here. What else do you want from me?!
(No seriously tell me what you want while I figure this out)