Daysed and Confused

Hawkwind: Days of the Underground: Radical Escapism in the Age of Paranoia, Joe Banks (Strange Attractor 2020)

In terms of core issues around maximal engagement with key notions of cult bands, well, yeah, Hawkwind are the dog’s bollocks. They’ve been blasting eardrums and blowing minds for over fifty years. For flip’s sake.

This book is a detailed look at their first decade-and-a-bit. Too detailed for me, I have to admit, because I’m not a Hawkwind obsessive. And I don’t think drugs and loud music were ever a threat to the Powers That Be. In fact, they might have been a big help. They were certainly very self-indulgent and while loud music was wrecking a lot of ears, drugs were wrecking a lot of lives and a lot of minds. If you are a Hawkwind obsessive, you’ve probably already got this book and learnt that it’s something in which “even the most hardcore of Hawkfans will discover something new.” You’re probably also a Guardianista like Joe Banks, the author. His prose isn’t particularly bad, but it’s not particularly good either and he doesn’t know what a hanging participle is: “Initially hired as a road manager and driver, [Nik Turner]’s rudimentary talent on the saxophone soon sees him inducted into the new band.”

Fortunately, most Hawkwind fans, Guardianista and otherwise, won’t know what a hanging participle is either, so bad writing like that won’t bother them. And even if it did, Banks didn’t write everything in this book. And he didn’t take the photos or draw the art. There are a lot of rare images and a lot of interesting interviews with people who are important in the Hawkwind story, from electronics whiz DikMik to the statuesque Stacia, the nude dancer who was an eye-catching and improvisational part of early Hawkwind gigs.

So for me the book’s biggest failure is its cover. The cover looks flashy for a moment, then reveals its flaws when you look at it more carefully. The stumpy-legged female figure is ill-proportioned and ugly, for example, and the artist hasn’t captured the spirit of Hawkwind there or elsewhere. Looking at those flaws, I thought: “I don’t get it – why didn’t they ask maverick gay artist John Coulthart to do the cover? He did some Hawkwind albums, after all, so he was the obvious choice.” Then I thought: “Funnily enough, the cover looks like someone imitating Coulthart and not doing a very good job of it.” Then I looked at the credits for the book and discovered that the cover was actually by Coulthart.

Counter-cultural cock-up — Coulthart’s cruddy cover for Hawkwind: Days of the Underground

Oy veh! How long did he spend on it? Five, ten, even fifteen minutes? In fact, though, while the cover is slap-dash in one sense, I’m sure Coulthart spent a long time on it. But that will have been part of the problem. I don’t like the term “anally retentive” and I’m worried that applying it to the work of a gay artist like Coulthart will be regarded as homophobic.

But let’s face it: Coulthart’s art is anally retentive, man. And he’s never been good at representing three dimensions. Hawkwind, on the other hand, have always been the opposite of anally retentive. They’re half-hippy, half-biker, and they believe in spontaneity, intuition and improvisation. And their music is about expanding into as many dimensions as possible in as many ways as possible. That cover is rigid, regimented and far too symmetrical and two-dimensional to capture the free-flowing and ever-roaming spirit of Hawkwind. The fonts of the title and sub-titles are uninspired too. And why hasn’t Coulthart done something more interesting with the triangles on the straps hanging from the woman’s arms? Has he never heard of fractals or impossible geometry? Sheesh. Compare his bad and overly symmetrical book-cover with the good and subtly asymmetric album-cover that inspired it:

Hawkwind’s Space Ritual, cover by Barney Bubbles

That album-cover was obviously painted by a straight artist who liked the female body and could express what was appealing about it. And the bare breasts on Space Ritual are important not just because they’re part of what’s appealing about women, but because Hawkwind’s Stacia was famous for dancing in the nude. She was stacked and she stunned the eye. So why has Coulthart covered the breasts of his Stacia-figure? Is it because he’s not interested in female breasts or because the publisher Strange Attractor told him to keep the cover clean? If it’s the first reason, it’s another example of how he was the wrong artist for a book about Hawkwind. If it’s the second, that’s not very transgressive, is it? But perhaps it was better that the breasts were covered. This is what the gay genius Michelangelo came up with when he sculpted some bare female breasts:

Tomb of Giuliano II de’ Medici by Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Florence

Yuck! To conclude, then: good book, gay cover.

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World-Wide Wipe-Out

Empty World, John Christopher (1977)

John Christopher wrote better prose than John Wyndham but came up with weaker images. I’ve never found anything in his books to match the golden-eyed super-children of Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) or the walking, talking chlorophyllic killers of Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951).

But like Day of the Triffids, Empty World is a story about a world-wide wipe-out. Wyndham wiped out human civilization with a shower of green meteors that almost everybody watched and almost everybody was blinded by. After that, starvation, accidents and roaming triffids killed almost everybody. Christopher wiped out human civilization in a less spectacular but perhaps more powerful, because more believable, way: a plague of premature ageing. A disease appears that mimics the effects of progeria, the rare but disturbing condition that accelerates ageing so that children die of senility.

At first the plague of Empty World hastens the deaths of the truly old. Then it strikes the middle-aged, then adults in the prime of life, then teenagers, finally children. Everybody catches the disease and almost everybody dies of it, ageing by the day and slain by senility. The hero of the book is one of the very few who catch the disease and don’t die. He’s a teenager called Neil Miller and he’s already lost his entire family in a car-crash before the plague strikes. Empty World is written for teenagers and I think Christopher designed the book to appeal to teenage self-pity. Think you’ve got it bad? The hero of this book loses his family in a car-crash. Then he watches almost the entire human race get wiped out by a plague of accelerated ageing. So Empty World is what John Betjeman called “consolingly disastrous”: it’s about a big disaster that makes your own troubles seem minor and unimportant by comparison. And teenagers will appreciate that.

Empty World, cover of the first edition

But there’s one bit of Empty World that I think will work more strongly on adults than on teenagers. I won’t describe it, but it’s a small tragedy amid the mass-death of the book’s opening chapters. In one way the tragedy has a very old theme, because it involves Neil watching people he cares about suffer and die at the hands of cruel and callous Mother Nature. But Christopher gives that tragedy a true science-fiction twist. SF is about taking an idea from some branch of science – physics or chemistry or biology – and letting it loose on the world. What if? This if! In Empty World, Christopher has let loose the idea of a progeria-plague. On a big scale, that idea wipes out civilization. On a small scale, it brings Neil to a tragedy that was one of the most moving things I’ve ever read.

There’s nothing to match the power of that small tragedy in the remainder of the book. Indeed, the most powerful part of Empty World is the emptying of the world. Once the world is empty and Neil is searching for other survivors, the interest flags. Everyone else who has survived is a teenager too and after two false starts – one survivor turns out to be mad, another turns out not to be a survivor after all – Neil finds two girls, Lucy and Billie, living amid the abandoned houses and emporia of empty London. One of these new characters, Billie, would make the book impossible to publish nowadays, because she’s an unsympathetic lesbian who doesn’t want Neil to intrude on the relationship she’s already forged with Lucy.

Her lesbianism isn’t made explicit, but it’s obvious in Christopher’s crimethinkful descriptions: Neil at first thinks Billie is a boy, then finds her unattractive and hostile, and so on. In fact, Billie’s boyishness would make her a potential member of the transgender community nowadays, so Christopher’s crimethink is even worse. He’s not just a lesbophobe but a transphobe. Burn the book! Burn it! That would be the reaction nowadays. Or rather, the reaction would be: Don’t publish it. But even Christopher’s crimethink can’t enliven the second half of Empty World. The book starts powerfully and ends poorly. Or so I think now, having re-read it as an adult.

As a teenager, I enjoyed it more and I found that its central idea stayed with me permanently. What would change if I lived in an empty world? How much of what I do in a full world would become meaningless or futile in an empty world? Much more than was comfortable to think about. In other words, Empty World had an afterlife. I’ve read better books and forgotten them completely. I’ve never forgotten Empty World and I’m glad to have come across it again and read it again. And I’m glad it’s the same edition as the one I first read, the Puffin one with the clever and haunting cover by an artist called Dave Holmes. He painted a series of doors opening into the emptiness of a cloud-cruised sky.

Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

• Powerful in Patches – review of John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)

• Chlorokill – review of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951)

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Meet the Maverick Munch-Bunch…

Naked Krunch: The Sinister, Sordid and Strangely Scrumptious Story of SavSnaq, Dr David M. Mitchell (Savoy Books 2022)

Genius creates. We can all agree on that. But genius also… connects. And perhaps the greatest literary connection of the past fifty years and more was made when maverick Mancunian publisher Savoy Books began to interrogate core issues around the Holocaust, on the one hand, and crisps, on the other (“potato chips”, in American English).

It was a perfect example of that signature Savoyish celebration of jarring juxtaposition, of high and low culture, the epochal and the trivial, the supremely sacred and the sensibility-smashing subversive. But once the connection was made, yes, it seemed both utterly wrong and utterly right. As Savoy C.E.O. David Britton himself said: “Crisps are rock’n’roll in motherfucking excelsis – cheap, strongly flavoured, and loud!”

And when did Britton first bring crisps and the Holocaust together in the atrocitous atom-smasher of his incendiary imagination? It was in the transgressive toxi-text Fuck Off and Diet (1997). Recall the scene where Lord Horror performs a pas-de-deux with Eva Braun on the burning hull of a cannibal-crewed Zeppelin plummeting parapraxically to its doom on a municipal gasworks in Rusholme. Just before the end of the scene, Horror remarks to Eva in twelfth-century Guipúzcoan Basque: “Fancy a pickled onion?” Eva responds by silently – and synergistically – removing a single dead-Jew-flavoured crisp from her cleavage; sliding it into her mouth; crunching it with a sly wink; then belching Zyklon-B into Horror’s face. He savours the cyanide slay-gas with a sigh of satisfaction even as the Zeppelin hits the gasworks and explodes.

Maverick Munch… A seemingly innocent bowl of SavSnaq crisps…

It’s one of the most disturbing moments in one of the most disturbing books ever written. There are no more overt references to crisps and the Holocaust in the remainder of FOAD, but Britton was merely biding his time. As Dr David M. Mitchell describes in the first third of Naked Krunch, although crisps were a seemingly casual component of FOAD, six years later they had become a major motif of what is perhaps Britton’s maximal masterwork, the epoch-eviscerating Basted in the Broth of Billions (2003). Among much else in the book, Auschwitz is a felonious food-factory where Jews are turned into cheese’n’onion crisps, Gypsies into BBQ-Beef hula-hoops, homosexuals into smoky-bacon Pringles (“Once you popper, you can’t stopper!”), and so on. Mitchell conducts a thorough crispological survey of BitBoB, hunting down and hermeneuticizing even the most remote and recondite references to crisps, crisp-crunching and the Holocaust.

Having completed that literary survey of Savoy’s crisp-connecting, he next embarks on a detailed history of SavSnaq, the crispocentric company launched by Savoy to “storm the ramparts of the savoury-snack / party-nibbles market.” One of their early marketing slogans was “SavSnaq = Maximal Munch.” Another was: “You’ll Nosh Nowt Noxiouser.” And they did their very best to live up to the menace of that slogan. Mitchell describes how, in the early days, SavSnaq teetered on the brink of bankruptcy multiple times, as Britton & Co. fought off vicious legal challenges from the Health and Safety Executive after weaponizing a “Burroughs-themed heroin-flavoured crisp range.” Even today SavSnaq has never turned a profit, but Mitchell sets out an unassailable case that SavSnaq’s party-nibbles and savoury snacks have done to food-manufacturing what Savoy’s books and graphic novels had already done to English literature: revolutionized and reinvigorated a sadly and suffocatingly staid and sedentary sector.

Savinyl Tap: the wradical wrapper of SavSnaq’s Heretical Heroin™ range of “none-more-black” Burroughs-themed crisps…

In the first edition of Naked Krunch, Mitchell ended things there; in this updated edition, he goes on to examine the continuing impact of Savoy’s crisp-connections on wider culture. To take but one example: radical musicians have embraced Savoy’s incendiary interrogation of crisp-crunch to create revolutionary new genres, including the cataclysmic “crispcore” practised by sensory-overloading sonic terrorists Crunch-E))), who are now widely hailed as “the loudest band in the multiverse.” Dressed in shiny imitation crisp-wrappers, the three musicians of Crunch-E))) each eat a single packet of crisps into an ultra-sensitive microphone on stage. The resultant crunching is then slowed dramatically and amplified enormously before being projected through giant speakers onto an enraptured audience bathed in billowing clouds of cheese-and-onion-scented artificial smoke.

As Mitchell relates, David Britton once joked that every packet of SavSnaq crisps should be “so loud that every motherfuckin’ muncher develops terminal tinnitus.” Crunch-E))) have realized that visceral vision. The band have also explicitly acknowledged their artistic debt to Savoy and SavSnaq by naming their first three albums Basted (2005), Broth (2006) and Billions (2008). But this extra publicity for Savoy has not increased sales of Savoy’s books or of SavSnaq’s products. As Mitchell emphasizes repeatedly in Naked Krunch: Savoy and SavSnaq remain far too dangerous for general consumption.

And they always will. But the counter-cultural cognoscenti will continue to savour every last crumb that falls from super-subversive Savoy’s teratotropicly toxic table…

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Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…

• Fuck Off and Dienetics… – Headpress CEO Norman Nekrophile surveys Savoy’s satirical saunter thru Scientology…
• Naked Krunch — interrogating issues around David Britton’s Basted in the Broth of Billions (2008)
• Commit to Crunch — a review of Will Self’s Maverick Munch: Selecting a Sinisterly Savory Snack to Reinforce Your Rhizomatically Radical Reading (TransVisceral Books 2016)

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Powerful in Patches

The Kraken Wakes (1953) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), John Wyndham

The more I re-read John Wyndham, the more I recognize the genius of H.G. Wells. Where Wells wrote powerful books, Wyndham wrote powerful patches. And Wyndham obviously wished he could be Wells. One big example: The Kraken Wakes (1953) is pretty much The War of the Worlds (1897) played in a different key. And not played very well. In both books, the Earth is colonized by super-advanced aliens – or rather it isn’t in Wyndham’s book, because his aliens are from a planet whose atmosphere is at very high pressure. So they’re not interested in the surface of our planet, only in the deepest parts of the ocean. Their ships don’t land-and-open, but splash-and-sink.

That means there’s no good reason for them to come into conflict with humanity. They’re down there; we’re up here: never the twain need meet and quarrel. Wyndham has to contrive conflict to keep the plot going. And so the book has some effective patches – the initial wave of spherical alien ships shooting through the atmosphere and splashing down in the ocean; black, slug-like alien tanks crawling out of the sea to drag humans off with sticky tentacles – but doesn’t work as a whole. It’s also got a lot of irritating sub-Coward-esque dialogue between the husband-and-wife journalists who the story is told through. Although Wells wrote decades before Wyndham, his books have dated much less in some ways. Where Wyndham was stiff and stilted, Wells was smooth and sinuous.

Some of these criticisms also apply to The Midwich Cuckoos. But less so: this plot isn’t a re-write of Wells but a Wyndham original. And a good one, at first: a middling English village called Midwich has a “Day Out” when it’s the centre of what you could call a sphere of sleep. That is, every outsider who crosses a certain boundary falls into a deep sleep – the same deep sleep as every animate creature already inside the boundary. Then Midwich wakes up and everything seems to go back to normal. But not for long. It slowly becomes apparent that nearly every fertile woman in the village is pregnant and that they must have been impregnated during the still-unexplained Dayout.

The Cuckoos of the book’s title are in the womb and on their way. When they arrive, they have golden eyes and very strong wills. So strong, in fact, that even as babies they can make other people do their bidding. In other words, they’re telepathic. Then they start growing – and learning – with uncanny speed. They’re aliens, alright. To keep the plot going, Wyndham needs to bring them into conflict with humanity. And humanity doesn’t stand much of a chance with super-children like these. After the children enter their teens, the ordinary villagers of Midwich turn on them and try to attack the government institute in which they’re now being educated. So the children simply will the villagers into attacking – and killing – each other. Which brings the children into conflict with the police. This is an extract from the ironically titled chapter called “Interview with a Child”, when the Chief Constable of the district tries to exert his authority over an uncooperative golden-eyed boy:

“You damned little blackguard! You insufferable little prig! How dare you speak to me like that? Do you understand that I represent the police force of this country? If you don’t, it’s time you learnt it, and I’ll see that you do, b’God! […]”

He broke off suddenly, and sat staring at the boy. […] The Chief Constable’s mouth went slack, his jaws fell a little, his eyes widened, and seemed to go on widening. His hair rose slightly. Sweat burst out on his forehead, at his temples, and came trickling down his face. Inarticulate gobblings came from his mouth. Tears ran down the side of his nose. He began to tremble, but seemed unable to move. Then, after long rigid seconds, he did move. He lifted hands that fluttered, and fumbled them towards his face. Behind them, he gave queer thin screams. He slid out of the chair to his knees on the floor, and fell forward. He lay there grovelling, and trembling, and making high whinnying sounds as he clawed at the carpet, trying to dig himself into it. Suddenly he vomited.

That is an effective – and unpleasant – description of someone having their amygdalae hijacked. The children can interfere directly with the brain of anyone they please. Which is a disturbing thought to go with other disturbing thoughts in the book – Wyndham always mixed horror into his science-fiction. But as with The Kraken Wakes, I don’t think he contrives the conflict between aliens and humanity very well. If the children are so clever, why are they so openly arrogant and self-centered? And why are they so obviously alien? They should have kept their heads down and grown to their full powers, then revealed their hostile intentions. But they didn’t need to spend so long doing that either. The alien race from which they came had the power to somniferate-and-impregnate Midwich – and other places around the world, it becomes apparent. But if the aliens could do all that, why did they need to act like cuckoos?

No, the book doesn’t make sense, as a whole. It’s probably better to read it as the transcript of a dream or nightmare than as a conventional SF novel. But Wyndham’s pedestrian prose makes it difficult to read it as oneiro-lit: his books also make me recognize the genius of J.G. Ballard more. All the same, The Midwich Cuckoos might be Wyndham’s best book and the big questions it raises haven’t gone away. On the contrary, they’ve got more relevant than ever. Advances in genetics, neurology and cybernetics mean that super-children and direct interference with the brain aren’t far off, one way or another. What will happen when they arrive? John Wyndham asked that more than half-a-century ago. He wasn’t a literary giant like Wells or Ballard but his books are still well worth reading. And re-reading.

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Elsewhere other-accessible…

• Chlorokill – The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham (1951)

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Fall of the Wild

A Fall of Moondust, Arthur C. Clarke (1961)

Nothing dates faster than the future, which is why I think Arthur C. Clarke does indeed deserve to be called one of the greatest science-fiction writers. Despite his cardboard characters and his adolescent psychology, his futures are still plausible, still capable of suspending disbelief, decades after he created them. At his best and boldest, he was a kind of optimistic, neurosis-free Lovecraft: Rendezvous with Rama (1973) has gigantic themes and images, but with irony and understatement too.

Man’s first encounter with an alien civilization doesn’t work the way it should, but that adds to the interest and the fun. Clarke wrote with gusto and seems to have lived that way too. He might have moved to Sri Lanka partly to indulge his paederasty, but he also liked the sunshine and sea he found there. The sea is a frontier, something that challenges and sometimes punishes the men who want to explore and exploit it, and Clarke’s writing is always about frontiers. His characters are always explorers in some way, part of an effort to expand into the unknown. Where J.G. Ballard dove into the head and explored the endless possibilities of mind, Clarke dove out of it, away into the universe, and explored the endless possibilities of matter. A Fall of Moondust is about a very simple form of matter in a very strange setting:

No one could have told, merely by looking at it, whether the Sea [of Thirst] was liquid or solid. It was completely flat and featureless, quite free from the myriad cracks and fissures that scarred all the rest of this barren world. Not a single hillock, boulder, or pebble broke its monotonous uniformity. No sea on Earth – no millpond, even – was ever as calm as this.

It was a sea of dust, not of water, and therefore it was alien to all the experience of men; therefore, also, it fascinated and attracted them. Fine as talcum powder, drier in this vacuum than the parched sands of the Sahara, it flowed as easily and effortlessly as any liquid. A heavy object dropped into it would disappear instantly, without a splash, leaving no scar to mark its passage. Nothing could move upon its treacherous surface except the small, two-man dust-skis – and Selene herself, an improbable combination of sledge and bus, not unlike the Sno-cats that had opened up the Antarctic a lifetime ago. (ch. 1)

There you can see Clarke’s greatness as a science-fiction writer. He took his scientific knowledge and created something new but entirely plausible from it: a sea of dust where a ship called the Selene sails for the entertainment and edification of tourists. It’s a frontier, a new place for man to test his engineering and his ingenuity. And the test gets very big when Clarke arranges for the Selene to sink. I won’t describe how he does it, but again he’s creating something new but entirely plausible from his scientific knowledge. His stories often creak psychologically and sociologically, but they’re always technically solid.

And he can mix macrocosm and microcosm. When the Sea of Thirst gapes and gulps down the Selene, her captain Pat Harris is overwhelmed by a childhood memory:

He was a boy again, playing in the hot sand of a forgotten summer [back on Earth]. He had found a tiny pit, perfectly smooth and symmetrical, and there was something lurking in its depths – something completely buried except for its waiting jaws. The boy had watched, wondering, already conscious of the fact that this was the stage for some microscopic drama. He had seen an ant, mindlessly intent upon its mission, stumble at the edge of the crater and topple down the slope.

It would have escaped easily enough – but when the first grain of sand had rolled to the bottom of the pit, the waiting ogre had reared out of its lair. With its forelegs, it had hurled a fusillade of sand at the struggling insect, until the avalanche had overwhelmed it and brought it sliding down into the throat of the crater.

As Selene was sliding now. No ant lion had dug this pit on the surface of the Moon, but Pat felt as helpless now as that doomed insect he had watched so many years ago. Like it, he was struggling to reach the safety of the rim, while the moving ground swept him back into the depths where death was waiting. A swift death for the ant, a protracted one for him and his companions. (ch. 2)

Death will be protracted for the crew and passengers of the Selene because they survive submersion, but have no way of making contact with the outside world: the dust, “with its high metallic content, was an almost perfect shield” for radio waves. So nobody knows what has happened to them or where they are, and for a time it seems as though nobody ever will. Then a clever but socially clumsy scientist discovers a way to detect the Selene. Rescue gets under way above the dust while the social dynamics of living entombment work out below it. Clarke is much better with technology than he is with psychology and the social side of A Fall of Moondust isn’t what makes it worth reading. There’s some disturbing and even disgusting sexism: one of the passengers is a trouble-making “neurotic spinster”, for example – and yes, Clarke actually uses that phrase.

And the private technology of the novel, as opposed to the public, is no good. In fact, the private technology is non-existent. The trapped passengers ward off boredom by pooling their reading matter: “the total haul consisted of assorted lunar guides, including six copies of the official handbook; a current best seller, The Orange and the Apple, whose unlikely theme was a romance between Nell Gwyn and Sir Isaac Newton; a Harvard Press edition of Shane, with scholarly annotations by a professor of English; an introduction to the logical positivism of Auguste Comte; and a week-old copy of the New York Times, Earth edition.”

The story is set in about 2040, but Clarke didn’t anticipate iPads and Kindles, so A Fall of Moondust is a curious mixture of visionary and vapid. You could see it as a thought-experiment: what happens scientifically and psychologically when a ship is submerged in a sea of dust? His science works well, whether the Selene is overheating or suddenly and almost fatally settling deeper in the sea. And there’s a characteristically clever and concise Clarkean touch right at the end, when the Selene has been successfully evacuated:

“Is everyone out?” Lawrence asked anxiously.

“Yes,” said Pat. “I’m the last man.” Then he added, “I hope,” for he realized that in the darkness and confusion someone might have been left behind. Suppose Radley had decided not to face the music back in New Zealand…

No – he was here with the rest of them. Pat was just starting to do a count of heads when the plastic floor gave a sudden jump – and out of the open well shot a perfect smoke ring of dust. It hit the ceiling, rebounded, and disintegrated before anyone could move.

“What the devil was that?” said Lawrence. (ch. 30)

If you want to know what it was, you’ll have to read this book. And I can recommend it. Clarke was not a great psychologist or a subtle wordsmith, but he was a great science-fictioneer. This book published in 1961 still retains its scientific and technical interest more than half-a-century later. A Fall of Moondust isn’t his best work, but it’s impressive all the same.

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Schlock Xpress

The Bad Movie Bible: The Ultimate Modern Guide to Movies That Are So Bad They’re Good, Rob Hill (Art of Publishing 2017)

(This is a guest-review by Pablo Magono)

There are good movies and bad movies. Among the latter, there are “movies so bad that you might think Adam Sandler was responsible for them, but so funny it won’t be for long.” That’s the simple premise behind The Bad Movie Bible. It’s easy to read, very funny, and full of information, posters, interesting screen-grabs, prize quotes, and sizzling starlets flashing flesh.

And as if that weren’t enough, the icing on the cake is that The Bad Movie Bible is itself mildly infected by Bad-Movie-itis. There are repeated references to a mysterious “right of passage” and the publisher’s address is given as “Bloosmbury”. Is this part of the joke? No, I don’t think so. It’s just a reminder that to err is human. But to err as badly as some of the movies here might be superhuman. Literally so, because Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is one of the entries in the “Science Fiction & Fantasy” section.

Elsewhere there are sections for “Action” and “Horror”, plus a grab-bag section called “The Rest” that collects everything from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) and The Room (2003) to Empire of the Ants (1977) and Double Down (2005). All movies get ratings out of 10 for five essential filmographic categories: “Cheese”, “Acting”, “Excess”, “Ineptitude” and “What?” (“reflecting the movie’s propensity to offer up moments of baffling wonder”). The higher the mark, the badder-better that aspect of the movie. Then there’s an overall “BMB Rating”, again out of 10, which doesn’t necessarily reflect the average score on the other categories. Some movies are more than the sum of their parts, some are less.

The best of the baddest are also accompanied by interviews with stars, stuntmen or those who rescued them from oblivion. For fetid fans of scuzz-cinema, this book should provide many happy hours first of reading, then of watching its recommendations. But could anything ever live up to the promise of a title like Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977)? Or Kung Fu Cannibals (1982)? In the latter case, apparently it could: the movie, better-known as Raw Force, gets a BMB Rating of 10, despite an average rating of 8.4 on the other categories (only “What?” is 10/10). The horror movie Things (1989) also gets a BMB Rating of 10, but its average score on the sub-categories is 9.6 – it gets 10/10 for “Acting”, “Excess”, “Ineptitude” and “What?”, but “Cheese” is 8/10.

That makes Things the baddest-bestest in the book. For Rob Hill, anyway. It’s not his favourite movie in the book, mind, but he knows what he’s talking about. He has a lot of knowledge, with enthusiasm and wit to match:

Miami Connection is an extremely positive movie that preaches tolerance and the need to accept people from all walks of life. Unless they’re drug-dealing motorcycle ninjas. (Miami Connection, 1987) … Writer / director Amir Shervan doesn’t stumble around the fringes of incompetence: he jumps right into the middle of it and does a jig. (Samurai Cop, 1991) … During the following night the sword is blown out of Christie’s closet on fishing wire by a wind machine. (Ninja III: The Domination, 1984) … Just like its star, Deadly Prey has been honed, buffed and oiled to within an inch of its life, then stripped virtually naked and released into the wild. (Deadly Prey, 1987) … The best teenagers-get-eaten-by-radioactive-plankton-fed-mutant-human-hybrid-flying-fish movie ever made. (Creatures from the Abyss, aka Plankton, 1994) … The apparent lack of any traditional cinematic luxuries (posh stuff like a tripod to keep the camera steady) makes this hard to watch at times. … But there’s something about it. If we’re honest, that something might just be a sexually promiscuous doll. It’s hard to say. (Black Devil Doll from Hell, 1984) … Ben & Arthur is a personal and heartfelt glimpse into the world of writer / director / star Sam Mraovich. His world is batshit crazy. (Ben & Arthur, 2002) … It must be hard for a man surrounded by Bee Gees to look like the smug one. Peter Frampton has a real talent for it. (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1978)

Hill also has space for some “deliberately cheesy” movies like The Ice Pirates (1984) and Traxx (1988). He includes them because he thinks they’re not as knowing as they wanted to be: “Just because there are deliberate attempts to ape schlock, it doesn’t mean there can’t be inadvertent schlock, too.” Movies like this are “good-good, bad-bad and good-bad all at the same time.” But most of the book is given over to movies that are genuinely so-bad-they’re-good. With possible exceptions like the following, which might be so-bad-it-should-have-been-burned:

La Notte del Necrofilo / Night of the Necrophile (Italy / Romania 1986)

After watching an ordinary scuzzy movie, you may well be left wishing you could bleach your eyeballs. After watching Night of the Necrophile, you may well be left wishing that eyeballs had never been invented. This movie doesn’t merely plumb unprecedented depths of depravity, bad taste and offensiveness: it finds depths below the depths, and then depths below those. The ineptitude and amateurishness merely add an extra shot of slime to the whole fetid cocktail.

But the ineptitude doesn’t extend far enough. You can’t take refuge in an incoherent or non-existent plot, because the noxious narrative is all too appallingly evident and easy to follow. Gypsy criminals Gran Voio (played by a cackling Eric Napolito) and his dwarvish cousin Piccolo Psico (Samuel Tegolare) are hired by the black-clad, mask-wearing Doktor Nekro (Victor Queresco), a Nazi scientist / war-criminal who’s been hiding out in the badlands of southern Italy since the end of the war. He needs their help to collect a fresh batch of young female corpses for his perverted experiments in reanimation. The toxic trio set off in a refrigerated truck, committing brazen street-murders to source their stock or sneaking into municipal mortuaries and loading the freshest and most attractive corpses into their necro-wagon.

Then, just as night falls and news comes over the radio of a heat-wave the following day, the truck breaks down on the winding mountain road that leads back to Doktor Nekro’s well-hidden lair. The refrigeration fails and the three depraved criminals are left with a stash of stolen stiffs that aren’t going to keep… I’d describe what happens next, but I’m worried that my keyboard would report me to the authorities. Suffice it to say that Doktor Nekro begins to commit medical infractions that the framers of the Hippocratic oath could never have anticipated – indeed, could never have imagined possible. […]

The mysterious and probably pseudonymous director is rumoured to have died shortly after completing the movie, possibly of shame, his body being shipped back to Romania for burial. In his absence, Night of the Necrophile was hastily edited and rush-released in a desperate attempt to stave off Sanguecine’s looming – and well-deserved – bankruptcy. Be warned. And then warned again. This is a movie that makes Things seem like Citizen Kane and The Gore Gore Girls seem like Bambi. Approach with extreme caution.

That’s not a typical movie here, but it helps make The Bad Movie Bible as varied as the real Bible. It’s “Bad to the Bon”!

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Art of Darkness

A Clarificatory Conspectus for Core Comprehension of Key Counter-Culturality

(Click for larger version)

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Elsewhere other-engageable:

• Ex-term-in-ate!…
• Maximal Metric…
• Keyly Committed Components…

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Reds in the Head

The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells (1898)

You don’t read some books: you live them. Treasure Island (1883) is like that; so is The War of the Worlds. Both books appeared before true cinema, but they have the vividness of films and more besides, because cinema can’t evoke scent, smell, taste and sensation as language can. Words create worlds in your head and the best writers, like Wells and Stevenson, can make the real world grow dim while you read. I first read both books as a child and both have stayed with me, so that every time I re-read them I can remember how it felt to read them that first time.

Or rather: I can remember how it felt to live them. I had heard the rustling feathers of Long John Silver’s parrot in Treasure Island; I had tasted the bitterness of the red Martian weed that smothers large parts of London in War of the Worlds. Both books are written in the first person and they’re both full of twists and surprises. That first person – the constant “I, Me, Mine”, as George Harrison put – helps explain why they’re so vivid, but it took much more than that. Stevenson and Wells were literary geniuses, masters of creating worlds from pure imagination.

After all, Stevenson had never lived in the eighteenth century and gone sailing on a treasure-hunt. Wells had never experienced an invasion by Martians. But you will if you read War of the Worlds. Wells captures the way it might have been with great skill and subtlety, from the mysterious lights and flashes seen by astronomers on Mars to the landing of the first cylinder containing Martians. Every time I re-read I know exactly what’s coming, but the narrator never does and I experience the story through him, so that it never fails to seem fresh and exciting.

Or horrifying. The Martians are like red octopuses, but they seem harmless and even pitiful at first, struggling to cope with the stronger gravity of Earth. Then suddenly they turn into death-dealing monsters, with a military technology far in advance of Victorian England’s and the will to use it without mercy. Or does “mercy” apply to creatures from another world? That’s one of the questions faced by the narrator when he sees the Martians at work, whether they’re slaughtering humans with their heat-rays and poison gas or capturing humans for food. The Martians aren’t men and our standards don’t apply. We matter to us, but why should we matter to them?

Because I’m living through the narrator, the ending of the story still seems surprising. Man was helpless, but Mother Nature wasn’t, as the narrator suddenly learns. Wells is good at shifts of perspective that make you see human beings and the world in a new way. Arthur C. Clarke learned that from him, but Wells was a greater and more grown-up writer. Today we know that Mars isn’t likely to invade, but The War of the Worlds remains an excellent adventure story and a continued warning about the “infinite complacency” with which men go “to and fro over this globe with their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter” (“The Coming of the Martians”).

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Clarke’s Sparks

The Collected Stories, Arthur C. Clarke (Victor Gollancz 2000)

Do you want to know the difference between ingenuity and imagination? Between literary competence and literary genius? Then compare Arthur C. Clarke’s short stories with J.G. Ballard’s short stories. Reading Ballard is like exploring a jungle; reading Clarke is like touring a greenhouse. Ballard is haunting and head-expanding in a way that Clarke isn’t, much as he might have wanted to be.

You could say that the difference between them is like the difference between wizardry and engineering or poetry and prose or madness and sanity. Clark Ashton Smith and J.R.R. Tolkien are different in the same way. Ballard and Smith could conjure dreams on paper; Clarke and Tolkien could create realistic worlds. I like all four writers, but I don’t place them at the same level. There is a great gulf fixed between the wizards and the engineers. I’m reminded of it every time I read Clarke and Tolkien, so part of the value of their work is that it teaches me to appreciate Ballard and Smith more. Or to marvel more.

All the same, the engineers could do things that the wizards couldn’t. Clarke and Tolkien were better educated than Ballard and Smith, and Clarke knew more about hard science than Ballard. There are some ideas and images in this book that take realism to its limits. The life-form that Clarke invented for “Castaway” (1947) has stayed with me ever since I read the story as a child. It was thrown off its home-world by a storm – or rather, thrown out of its home-world. That’s because it was a plasma-creature living inside the sun until it was ejected by a solar storm and blown on the solar wind to the Earth:

The tenuous outer fringes of the atmosphere checked his speed, and he fell slowly towards the invisible planet. Twice he felt a strange, tearing wrench as he passed through the ionosphere; then, no faster than a falling snowflake, he was drifting down the cold, dense gas of the lower air. The descent took many hours and his strength was waning when he came to rest on a surface hard beyond anything he had ever imagined.

The unimaginably hard surface is actually the Atlantic Ocean, where the plasma-creature is detected by the radar of an overflying jet-liner. It looks like a giant amoeba to the wondering humans who are watching the radar, but they can’t see anything at all when they look at the water. The story is a very clever exercise in shifts of perspective and Clarke returned to these ideas in “Out of the Sun” (1958), in which the same kind of creature is thrown out of the sun and lands on Mercury, where it freezes to death in “seas of molten metal”. More wondering humans have watched it fly through space on radar from a solar-observation base. As it dies, the humans feel a “soundless cry of anguish, a death pang that seeped into our minds without passing through the gateways of the senses.”

There’s also alien life and clever invention in “A Meeting with Medusa” (1971), which is about a solo expedition to Jupiter that discovers giants in the clouds: browsing herbivores that defend themselves from swooping predators with electrical discharges. The explorer is called Falcon and is part-robot after an air-ship crash on earth. That enables him to survive “peaks of thirty g’s” as his air-ship, called Kon-Tiki, descends to the “upper reaches of the Jovian atmosphere” and collects gas so that it can float there and observe. The story takes you to Jupiter and teaches you a lot about Jovian physics, chemistry and meteorology: it’s realism, not reverie, and Falcon’s discovery of life is entirely plausible.

The story was probably influenced by Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Horror of the Heights” (1913), a proto-Lovecraftian story in which an early aviator discovers similar predators high in the air above Wiltshire. Doyle’s contemporary H.G. Wells was certainly an influence on Clarke: there’s even a piece here (not a proper story) called “Herbert George Morley Roberts Wells, Esq.” (1967). Clarke also knew Lovecraft and wrote a short parody of At the Mountains of Madness (1931) called At the Mountains of Murkiness, but the parody isn’t collected here and Lovecraft’s influence isn’t very obvious. Clarke had a sunny and optimistic personality and wrote few dark or depressing stories. There is a definite Lovecraftian touch, however, in one of the mini-stories collected under the title “The Other Side of the Sky” (1957). In “Passer-By”, an astronaut describes seeing something as he travels between space-stations on a rocket scooter. First he spots it on radar, then watches as it flies past:

I suppose I had a clear view of it for perhaps half a second, and that half-second has haunted me all my life. […] Of course, it could have been a very large and oddly shaped meteor; I can never be sure that my eyes, straining to grasp the details of so swiftly moving an object, were not hopeless deceived. I may have imagined that I saw that broken, crumpled prow, and the cluster of dark spots like the sightless sockets of a skull. Of one thing only was I certain, even in that brief and fragmentary vision. If it was a ship, it was not one of ours. Its shape was utterly alien, and it was very, very old.

It’s Lovecraftian to compare the portholes of a space-ship to the eye-sockets of a skull. So is the idea of a “very, very old” wreck flying between the stars. The uncertainty and doubt are Lovecraftian too, but you could also say that they’re scientific. Clarke often emphasizes the fallibility of the senses and the uncertainty of inferences based on them. Science is a way of overcoming those sensory limitations. In Lovecraft, science is dangerous: that uncertainty would slowly give way to horror as the truth is revealed. Clarke’s protagonist experiences no horror and though he’s haunted for life by what he might have seen, he feels that way because he didn’t learn enough, not because he learnt too much.

That story may have been the seed for Rendezvous with Rama (1973), which could be seen as a more optimistic re-working of At the Mountains of Madness. Puny humans explore a titanic alien artefact in both stories, but Clarke’s humans aren’t punished for their curiosity and at the end of the novel they look forward to indulging more of it. Clarke is good at grandeur and invoking the hugeness of the universe. He wrote about galaxy-spanning empires, giant scientific discoveries and struggles to save the universe.

He wrote about the multiverse too and there’s a story that makes the multiverse seem big by portraying a very confined part of it. This is the opening paragraph of “The Wall of Darkness” (1949):

Many and strange are the universes that drift like bubbles in the foam upon the river of Time. Some – a very few – move against or athwart its current; and fewer still are those that lie forever beyond its reach, knowing nothing of the future or past. Shervane’s tiny cosmos was not one of these: its strangeness was of a different order. It held one world only – the planet of Shervane’s race – and a single star, the great sun Trilorne that brought it life and light.

Shervane is a young man who makes a very strange discovery when he tries to cross a giant wall that circles his home planet. What is on the other side? In a way, everything is. This is another story that has stayed with me from my first reading of it as a child. And it could almost have been written by Ballard: like Ballard’s “The Concentration City” (1957) or “Thirteen to Centaurus” (1962), it’s about trying to escape from confinement and making an unexpected or ironic discovery about the true nature of things. Unlike Ballard, Clarke didn’t spend the Second World War locked in a prison camp, but he could get big ideas from a wall and the limit it imposed.

Neither he nor Ballard always wrote about big and serious ideas, however. Many stories here are deliberately small and silly, or big in a ludicrous way. P.G. Wodehouse seems to be an influence on the stories that come under the heading of Tales from the White Hart, in which Harry Purvis spins fanciful yarns for an audience of scientists and science-fiction writers in a pub in London. One story has an exploding moonshine still, another a giant squid that’s angry about its brain being manipulated, another a fall of twenty feet during which an unfortunate scientist doesn’t merely break the sound-barrier, but travels so fast that he’s burnt alive by air-friction.

It’s a horizontal fall too, although the story is called “What Goes Up” (1956). Clarke was playing with science there; elsewhere, in stories like “Green Fingers”, part of “Venture to the Moon” (1956), he’s making serious suggestions. The story is about a botanist on the moon who is killed by his own ingenuity, but it’s not a gloomy, Lovecraftian doom. Risks are part of exploration and adventure and Clarke presented space-travel as a new form of sea-faring. He loved both the sea and the sky and his love shines brightly here. So do “The Shining Ones” (1962), the intelligent cephalopods who end the life of another of his protagonists.

The premature death of adventurous young men is a theme he shared with A.E. Housman, whose poetry he greatly admired, but Clarke could also write about the rescue of adventurous young men, as in “Hide-and-Seek” (1949), “Summertime on Icarus” (1960) and “Take a Deep Breath” (1957). And deaths in his work aren’t futile or proof that man is always ultimately defeated. If Clarke had written pessimistically like that, he wouldn’t have been so popular among working scientists or inspired so many children to enter science. But he could appeal to children partly because he never properly grew up himself. Unlike Ballard, he never married or had any children of his own and his decision to live on Sri Lanka was probably inspired in part by paederasty, not just by his interest in scuba-diving.

My final judgment would be that he was an important writer, not a great one. I’ve enjoyed re-reading the stories here – even the numerous typos were fun – but that’s partly because they’ve sharpened my appreciation of J.G. Ballard. Clarke had no spark of divine madness: he was Voltaire to Ballard’s Nietzsche. His work does sparkle with intellect and ideas, but he made more out of science than he ever did out of fiction.

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Previously pre-posted on Papyrocentric Performativity:

• Clarke’s Arks – reviews of Imperial Earth (1976) and Rendezvous with Rama (1973)

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The Light of Day

SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, Vox Day (Castalia House 2015)

If Vox Day didn’t exist, Social Justice Warriors wouldn’t want to invent him. Indeed, they wouldn’t be able to imagine him: a white racist, sexist and homophobe who isn’t just more intelligent, more knowledgeable and wittier than they are, but isn’t actually white. As he delights in telling them: he’s part Hispanic and part American Indian. Like Milo Yiannopoulos, the gay conservative who supplies the introduction for this book, Vox Day is a living refutation of the Social Justice Weltanschauung.

That’s part of why they hate him so much. You’ll understand the rest by reading SJWs Always Lie. He understands them much better than they understand him. In fact, they don’t understand him at all. That’s why he’s so effective in his attacks on them and they’re so ineffective in theirs on him. SJWs certainly win many battles, but many more of their victims might survive if they have a copy of this book to guide them. The number one rule is: Never apologize. The Nobel Laureates James Watson and Sir Tim Hunt and the Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich disobeyed that rule and paid the price:

Watson’s apology could not have been more abject. Eich’s sincerity and abasement before the thought police could not have been more genuine or more groveling. Hunt’s apology could not have come quicker. Yet none of them proved sufficient to even marginally reduce the amount of social pressure the SJWs continued to bring to bear on them – pressure that none of them proved able to successfully withstand. (ch. 3, “When SJWs Attack”, pg. 72)

SJWs say they want to make the world a cleaner, kinder, caringer place. In fact, they want power. Which means, inter alia, the power to humiliate and destroy people who are superior to them. Orwell described another aspect of their psychology like this:

Sometimes I look at a Socialist — the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation — and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. (The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937)

Unfortunately, Day’s writing isn’t as powerful and effective as Orwell’s. SJWs Always Lie isn’t badly written or painful to read, but it’s by no means as well-written and pleasurable as it could have been. The cartoons by Red Meat that begin each chapter are often crisper and clearer than the prose that follows. As Orwell points out in “Politics and the English Language” (1946): “When you are composing in a hurry … it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style.” And Day certainly wrote this book in a hurry: I feel tired merely contemplating the amount he gets done not just as a writer but as a blogger, editor, gamer, and networker too.

Those are more reasons for SJWs to hate him. As a self-professed Christian, he shouldn’t hate them back and I think he mostly succeeds. But I also think he’s more Christianized than Christian. He’s pagan and aristocratic in his values, not humble or pacific. Nietzsche and Aristotle are much more apparent in his thinking and writing than Christ or St Paul: I can’t remember seeing “Molon labe, motherfuckers” in the Sermon on the Mount. But I have seen it at Day’s blog. If you visit the blog regularly, SJWs Always Lie will be reinforcement, not revelation, but by buying the book you support a very worthy cause. If one Vox Day can win endorsements like the following, imagine what ten or a hundred could do:

“Vox Day is one sick puppy.” – Dr. P.Z. Myers, PhD.

“Vox Day is a fascist mega-dickbag and less a human being than one long sequence of junk DNA.” – Dr. Phil Sandifer, PhD.

“Vox Day rises all the way to ‘downright evil’.” – Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Manager of Science Fiction, Tor Books, 15-time Hugo Award Nominee.

“Vox Day is a real bigoted shithole of a human being.” – John Scalzi, three-time SFWA President and science fiction author, 9-time Hugo nominee.

“The real burning question is, ‘what will Vox Day attack next?’” – Charles Stross, science fiction author, 15-time Hugo nominee. (“Praise for Vox Day”, pg. 7)

The answer to that last question is: the cuckservatives. A man isn’t known just by the company he keeps, but also by the opprobrium he heaps. After the SJWs, who better for Day to assail than the pseudo-conservatives of the Republican party? Like Nietzsche, Vox Day would be impossible to imagine if he didn’t exist. That’s why he’s memorable and that’s why he evokes such strong reactions, positive and negative. SJWs always lie and SJWs will always hate Vox Day. He wouldn’t want it any other way.

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