Dan Dare, Fascism and Punk
These are things that I think we've lost, Prime Minister. That Britain has lost. And ever since Space Fleet and the UN fell apart, and the very idea of international cooperation went under, that's exactly what our nation has done: lost.
I first encountered the British space comic icon Dan Dare briefly and late in its Eagle incarnation, the 1967 and 68 Eagle Annuals to be exact, when the stories were atypically short and both the writing and artwork poor quality (the 1968 Annual has one of the worst storylines ever committed to paper: space microbes destroy Earth's entire space fleet with invisible ships. They're invisible because they're so tiny! buttheyhavefullsizelaserbeamsohnevermind.) I never read either the 1950s Frank Hampton version, with the long storylines and the Mekon, or the 1977 2000AD version, or the 1980s Eagle version, or the 1990 Grant Morrison political spoof or ...
(Warning: spoilers for the Garth Ennis 2008 Dan Dare graphic novel)
The Secret History of Star Wars
The Secret History of Star Wars is a fan-written e-book that documents, in exhaustive (and exhausting) detail, the process by which the Star Wars film saga evolved over the last 30 years. At 533 pages, it's a bit of a doorstop, but there's a lot of material which is fascinating to someone like me (the frustrated artist/historian type) who loves listening to DVD commentaries, looking behind the stage sets and seeing how art is *really* made.
It turns out the answer is: with a great deal of hard work, a fair bit of brute-force copying, much misguided fannish enthusiasm, heaping helpings of pure luck, and above all it really helps if you have a circle of friends who can complement your weaknesses and add their own colour to the mix. Also, that there really aren't that many in the way of rules for making art except perhaps 'don't let your vision get in the way of your friendships.'
The original Star Wars, it seems, is proof that the best art really can emerge from a committee, and the prequels are proof that sometimes 'seeing a story in your head' can actually be a barrier to telling it.
Edit: Huh, I really didn't realise it's actually Star Wars Day today. Neat.
Review: The Essential Alan Parsons Project
CD: The Essential Alan Parsons Project
I've listened to a fair bit of post-Dark Side of the Moon Pink Floyd (and Roger Waters after he split), but other than hearing the radio single for Eye In The Sky, I've never really heard any Alan Parsons Project, despite knowing that Parsons was a sound engineer for DSotM and that they'd done a whole bunch of concept albums with vaguely science fiction/fantasy themes. So when I found a retrospective double CD with 34 tracks in the bargain bin for $15, it seemed like a good deal.
Listening to APP is like vicariously reliving chunks of the 1980s, and I mean that in a good way. I have a thing for treacly synth-pop with lush vocals and spacey orchestral arrangements. I will put this alongside my Vangelis and Electric Light Orchestra.
Favourite songs so far: Some Other Time, Old And Wise, Ammonia Avenue, La Sagrada Familia.
Rocking the House
I was out at the Crowded House / Supergroove / Pluto concert this weekend, which was great, except for being way too loud (a few decibels above pain level; my ears stopped hurting after about twenty-four hours). My brother and his wife, having done this a few times before, wore earplugs. For whatever reason I didn't bring any; I think a part of me wanted to experience such a big event (the reforming of Supergroove actually interested me more than the reforming of Neil Finn's band) as directly as possible, disintermediated. For future reference, though: earplugs == comfort.
The first two acts were lit by simple coloured strobes, and then Crowded House got the works: searchlights scanning the crowd, a multilayered backdrop/set that slowly erected itself piece by piece between songs, projected colours and logos over curtains over scultures. And Neil doing a perfectly calibrated mix of his new stuff and the old standards which have dominated NZ airwaves for the last twenty years or more. Ending in the big crowd-pleasing finales of not 'Don't Dream It's Over' and 'You'd Better Be Home Soon'. Words everyone knows and can sing along to, in a wall of sound like sticking your head inside a jet engine for four hours that puts you in your own private universe. (A universe of pain, for me, but I could at least appreciate the thought).
It got me thinking, though. Here's a stadium-sized rock concert, one of the defining acts of the Australian/NZ scene, as big as they get in this city. An arena full of people who are all delighted to be there. Huge amounts of talent, creativity and money thrown at the task of translating inspiration to art, art to performance, performance to technology, technology to emotion. Pretty much a peak of the state of the art of the defining art form of our era; an art form that only became possible fifty or so years ago, after electrical amplification techniques invented for or first applied to political rallies became used for entertainment. And I had a flash of how it must have felt in the early days of rock: this new thing, an electrified guitar; a military-specification sonic crowd control weapon wrested from the hands of authoritarianism and war, and repurposed for individualism, for the search for personal happiness and even love.
How it must have felt in those post-war years, the hopes, the fears about technology and for the new baby-boom generation in their cradles, and the silent generation who had been too young to go to war but were old enough now to see a new way to fight. How magical, spiritual the miracle of electrical amplification and the music it created must have seen, at least to some: almost a new form of worship. The Amp, counterpart to the Bomb. The tool for mental revolution.
How much intelligence, how much sincerity, how much dedication, how much time and money was thrown at rock music, and still is! And how powerful a force it was. And I marvelled, with my head in the jet engine, my ears in pain, thinking: how is it that with all this creative power focused on a point - on creativity, art rather than destruction - how is it that the world is still not saved?
The Beats and the sixties generation experimented, did their best to throw their best and brightest minds against the iron cages of the psychic prison that promised only nuclear war; how they randomised their thoughts with drugs and sex and music only to come up short, fail, burn out, defeated by their own hubris, their own darkness, or the sheer impossibility of the task.
(And even that mythology is a lie; the weapons industrial-science complex spawned creativity like the Internet; the entertainment industry was bleak and dirty and controlling, the more so as obscene amounts of money flowed in; teen rebellion was inspired by middle-aged teachers and slickly marketed as a commercial product from the beginning. There was no golden generation, just a bulge in the demographic curve and devastated international rivals and a trade surplus; there was no clash of cultures, just a change in tastes and marketing strategies.)
But still I thought: here I am, in arguably one of the best rock concerts, the best popular art our culture can create; and I feel nothing, or close to it. I feel a wall of sound, I feel a huge display of raw physics; I see beams of physical light shining out from the tiny distant stage; but somehow I expect more. I expect to see beams of spiritual light, feel a wall of spiritual empathy and emotion. I'm gathered in this place with thousands of my fellow citizens and fans; it is an iconic moment; I expect to feel something in the way of unity, somehow touch the vast oversoul that binds us; but I do not. I feel more alone here in my stadium seat in a crowd than at home typing on the Internet.
Why do I expect a spiritual experience from a rock concert? I don't know. A part of me just does.
And I think about fragments I've read in various prophecies and channelled writings: visions of Heaven, visions of a maybe future: thousands of people gathering in stadium-like enclosures, generating that kind of spiritual power that a rock concert does in raw decibels. Prayer concerts. Maybe without a stage even; maybe without a focal point. Maybe everyone comes in as they are, lift their hearts to the heavens, and invisible pyrotechnics begin.
I think maybe there's a time coming when we won't have the energy or infrastructure to run the huge audio amplification systems that power rock as a genre. But maybe this other kind of concert wouldn't even need that. I picture something like an event running for days, weeks even: people come in, people leave; the stadium remains packed. It's quiet. There's no infrastructure to speak of, no organisation; maybe some kind of skeleton organising committee, but without a huge sound and light rig, what actually is there to organise? Food, medical care maybe (and with a shiver, maybe in that possible tomorrow that's no small thing). Maybe things run themselves, anarcho-syndicalist collective style, like the Seattle '99 spokescouncils. There are no performers; the audience are the show. Everyone comes, brings themselves, their hopes, their fears, their visions, their inner stillness; the hush comes; something settles on the crowd. It's like the opening notes of a familiar guitar solo; but it's silent. Or at least, it's silent out there, in the air, but everyone feels it in here.
And the song begins, the song we heard a million years ago and all forgot until only just now. And maybe it doesn't ever stop.
And the house truly gets rocked.
Wilberforce and Werecats
I have many posts which want to write themselves, including one on the history of the Pentecostal churches in New Zealand, and quite a few book reviews. But for the moment, a report on my evening's entertainment.
I finally caught Amazing Grace, and it's just as brilliant as so many people have been reporting. I think in terms of movies that make me walk out of the theatre feeling like I just witnessed something unexpectedly wonderful, the last one that did that to me was Batman Begins. Yes, I really am comparing them.
Amazing Grace is one of those movies which is not only heavily and deeply Worthy in subject matter (dicey at best) but is also being actively marketed as a Political Event Movie by a number of Causes (mostly the Fair Trade people). Worse still, it's got a religious subtext, and is also being actively marketed as a religious movie. The combination can be awkward at best and heavy-handedly dismal at worst. I've seen, eg, Human Rights Festival documentaries and been challenged, terrified, inspired, manipulated etc, as expected. I saw Syriana, Goodnight And Good Luck, The Good German, and nodded wisely at Politically Worthy History As Story even as they hammered their (left-wing) point home so hard they dented the pile-driver. What is different about Amazing Grace - and why it's like Batman Begins - is that it works as a pure rip-roaring story, while at the same time having multiple subtle and beautifully balanced themes about the interplay of politics, religion, revolutionary idealism versus moral cowardice versus pragmatic caution. And it's a love story, and a historical epic. And somehow all put together it works.
What Batman Begins did - and did brilliantly - was to take a stable of standard superhero characters and subvert our lack-of-expectations about what sort of story could be told using these well-worn pieces. It played with themes of justice, vengeance, terrorism, and fear, and the delicate line between righteous anger and ruthless hate. It told a story gently critiquing the '00s War on Terror from the viewpoint of a character created in 1939. It wasn't perfect but by the standards of the filmed superhero genre, it was light-years above what had been done before and was well into the realms of the best of print superhero graphic novels such as Watchmen.
What Amazing Grace does is quietly startle us with the realities of a historical period where the world was swimming in revolution and either a new, more perfect social order, or the end of all things in blood and anarchy - or both - seemed to be breaking in everywhere. And a time where the religious and political battle lines were drawn differently than they are today. I walked out of the theatre with my head spinning. Was that really true? Could there have ever been a twentysomething Prime Minister of England and young political activists successfully fighting the system - and that in a time of war, revolution, insurgency, the rising power of capitalism, an insane king? The feel of the movie is of the English counterpart to the American Revolution: coffee-houses, Quakers, pamphleteering and sedition everywhere. And the dialog sizzles, with a Jane Austen kind of wit. If nothing else, I want to look up the real history of the late 1700s, of Pitt and Wilberforce, and find out just how liberal the scriptwriters were with the facts, and how much they embellished, because surely it can't have been like that. It has a graphic-novel kind of visual craftmanship to it: the swirl of capes, the clash of sabers in the glint of an eye.
And there aren't many historical movies I can make that claim about.
Afterwards, I heard The Ragamuffin Children doing, erm, 'tea-folk', which probably sums them up about as well as songs about werecats, pirates and the moon, performed with breathy vocals and keyboard in a teahouse, can be summed. This is the kind of music that Shelley Winters should be listening to or performing or both. (Though I am bitterly disappointed that neither 'My Alienfriend' nor 'If I Were A Werecat' are on the 'Werecat Lullabies' album. For shame!)
Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds
Just watched the DVD of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds stage show. A co-worker is going to see the real thing in Auckland; it's not coming to Christchurch or I'd be there.
There are a number of pop-culture artifacts that to me pop out of the background and make me go 'wow, I'm living in the future'. Little perfect iconic capsules of future-shock. They feel as if they belong in science fiction and give me a strange little shiver - did the world just take a wrong turn and I walked into a movie?
1. Microwave ovens. Radar! Cooks food! From the inside out! And doesn't kill people!
2. Compact disc technology. Silver discs! That reflect the light! And so cheap you could literally tile your walls with them if you wanted.
3. The first time I saw a URL advertised on a bus. At that moment I knew the Web had arrived. A globe-spanning data network and it's being used to sell stuff.
4. The Palm Pilot, circa 1997. A real computer, in your pocket. Star Trek's PADD made real. Now they're just 'phones'.
5. Secure Digital Cards. You've seen them everywhere in bad cyberpunk movies, tiny 'data chips', size of a postage stamp, store more info than a CD. Now they're real, too.
and now add another one: Jeff Wayne conducting his 1978 War of the Worlds album live in a huge arena, as a musical, with a movie backdrop, a Martian Tripod that lowers from the gods, while the giant floating head of Richard Burton narrates.
I think it's the giant floating Richard Burton head that sold it to me. The show itself is one of those parallel-universe blips - it's been a 'musical that wasn't' for so long, everyone asks 'so what was the show of this like?' and the answer is always 'there wasn't one! it's not a cast recording! it's a concept album!' Now the universe has walked quietly into another room and there is a show of the show that wasn't. So far, so groovy.
But reanimating a dead actor, and glueing his face to a ten-foot high sculpted floating plastic head... that's magic. Or at least another step toward the Sci-Fi Future, where virtual actors make Hollywood obsolete and suddenly we have stars leading the anti-robot union.
Another of those little shivers of recognition that I hadn't realised, is the link between Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds and Space Invaders. I didn't realise that both came out in 1978. I don't know the release dates down to the month, but the game's creator Tomohiro Nishikado is on record that the concept of the Invaders is definitely based on at least the novel of War of the Worlds. Wells' aliens (tentacles, aggressive, advanced technology, death-rays) are of course the prototype for just every 'alien invasion' scenario ever, but I hadn't put Jeff Wayne's piece together until hearing the concert DVD and realising how similar the soundscape - moody synths, an alien 'heartbeat' while the first pod unscrews - is to that whole dawn era of videogames.
Of course, it was 1978 and in 1977 the pop-culture world was already looking toward the skies: Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had been blockbusters, Battlestar Galactica was launching on TV, Skylab was struggling to stay in orbit (it would crash in Western Australia in 1979). Star Trek Phase II, then to become The Motion Picture (and then the Next Generation), was in production. Space was cool again.
But was Nishikado inspired to think about H G Wells by Jeff Wayne's album, or it just one of those cases of interesting synchronicity? I'm not sure which idea I find cooler, but the two pop-culture properties do seem to just go together.
