Black Metal Veins

Lucifer Valentine, probably best known for *Slaughtered Vomit Dolls* made this documentary in the late 00s. It was supposed to be a chromicle of one of his fans lifestyle in the Virginia Black Metal scene but ended up being much more about him and his friends substance abuse. Personally I think the intention was to make a shocking gonzo exploitation / snuff film that used the realist elements to root the horror scenes and make them more impactful. It fails in those terms because the grisly stuff where (minor spoiler) some of the participants apparently die on camera are clearly faked, come off as a bit cheesey. What he does manage to do, somewhat paradoxically, is capture the reality and the despair of the front line of the class war in late capitalist America. These kids, this doomed generation are the product of the opiod crisis and this could well be watched along with a good documentary about the Sacklers and the opiod crisis in general. The fake OD looks like balls and is not scary but just hearing these people talk about their lives and seeing their mental and physical deterioration under the strain of the junky / crack head lifestyle is fucking terrifying. Worth a watch, probably more so than any of Valentines other stuff. Worth getting the DVD with the directors commentary and extras.

If they made The Crow today.....

 

What bands and artists would you think would be on the soundtrack? That OST for The Crow is still just a great alternative music compilation album, some big acts and some slightly more obscure ones but all good repping different parts of what the scene was back in the mid 90s.  But if they were doing one now, with the dearth if not the death of MTV and alt radio its hard to really say whats big or current in underground music, unless you're in a major urban centre with a healthy live scene (or like, usually when the apocalypse lurghy isn't haunting us around every corner). I myself have a few ideas of what I'd like to see which I will share but I'd like to hear from other people (assuming anyone actualy reads these things which doesn't appeear to be the case :)).

What artists do you think would be a good representation of where the scene is at right now, or what alt music have you heard recently that you think would match any of the emotional beats of the comic(s) if you're familliar with the source material (O'Barr himself said the music he was listening to which fed into the vibe of the comic book as he was creating it was Iggy Pop, and all your classic 1st wave goth and alt rock groups, Joy Division, Bauhaus, The Cure)?

The following is my personal recreation of what I personally think would / should be on there.

1. 3Teeth

                                   

Yeah? I mean in terms of bands that have come up in the last decade or so are really flying the flag for our thing and doing it well 3Teeth have been at the forefront of a revivial of the old WaxTraxx sound and returning a bit of cred to a scene mired down in cheese.

2. She Wants Revenge

                                

This track has been used on AHS and is I think a recognised classic and their stuff is mostly pretty good (decent live too). Seems like a no-brainer. Probably the closest non-legacy band to the sounds that inspired O'Barr, mostly for the fact that they're just straight up doing the goth post-punk formula really well.

3. Chelsea Wolfe

Just as the original had some slower more emotional moments and some transcendently pretty female vocal led tracks to bring the punch of those moments out, if we're looking at contemporary artists I think a bit of Chelsea would do rightly for capturing the more melancholy emotional beats of the story.

4. Ghostemane

I feel like this is an artist that should be on there as much because he represents something genuinely new thats happened to the scene and something very current because he's fucking sick and has a range of tracks already that could be inserted into that narrative.

5. Adam X

 

Hearing some genuinely good contemporary techno during the nightclub scenes in The Batman when I went to see it last weekend is one of the things that had me on the train of thought that led to this post, like if there was something simmilar happening in The Crow, what would be appropriate? I was thinking some german EBM-Techno like this or some Ancient Methods, Vatican Shadow, Regis or something like that, or maybe something a bit harder like:

6. Paula Temple

which bangs a bit more, is more discordant, abstract and aggy in general.

7. Bob Vylan

Coming back around to more guitar led music, RATM had a track, as did the Henry Rollins band so you'd want some sort of punk represented and Bob Vylans grime inflected-punk, usually with very angry political messaging would seem like a good succesor

8. Turnstile

These lads dropped one of the big scene albums of last year and they've done some really interesting electronic crossover stuff with Mall Grab so you could go that way instead?

9. Spirit Box

Feels like this group could be part of the conversation here as well, since they blew up pretty big very recently and represent a more contemporary sound in Metal that feels very now

10. IDLES

Harking back one again to contemporary takes on the sounds of Post-Punk that inspired the comic. IDLES is one of the groups out now taking on and pushing that sound. 

11. Rein

Now, getting abck to the more traditionally Gothic. There's been an explosion of bands that have given this old genre a shot in the arm, Linea Aspera, Boy Harsher, Azar Swan, Drab Majesty, Perturbator, Riki and so on, but this girl, who's concept album is very much a cyber-punk conceptually oddessy about life and coming back from death. Sounds like our girl if you ask me.

12. Petbrick

Something that wouldn't have been on the original because it wasn't a thing at that point but could be now, I feel, would be the metal-fusion stuff in the far left field of the electronic music scene. Projects like Drumcorps, DJ SkullVomit and Igorrr have been leading the way but of all that sound the best thing I've come across recently was Petbrick, a side project of the drummer from Sepultura Iggor Caldera and Wayne Adams who's been doing simmilar music for years. This is good aggy fight scene music, perfect for a stand off with a major villain.

 

13. Roly Porter (for the score)

 

The original fampusly also had an excellent score even aside from the OST by Graeme Revell of the legendary pioneering Industrial Noise music group SPK. Few there are who would be a worthy successor, though one could make a case for Merzbow or maybe Orphyx, personally I think Mr Porter here, formally of the dubstep bassweights Vex'd who I personally feel have been responsible for some of the absolute best and most industrial music of the last couple of decades and Roly's ambient works could do absolure wonders on the film score.

14. Ice Nine Kills

And finally, this has all been pretty speculative so far, these guys already have one in the bag waiting to go. BTW the video starts with a bit of a skit and the actual track is about halfway through the video if you're watching the link. I dunno how much I like this band in general, feels a bit gimmicky because thats exactly what it is, but it also is kind of good, so....? eh. People do seem to like them though.

If we're talking about bringing anyone back, of the artists that were on there originally The Cure and Nine In Nails (or Trent paired back up with Atticus Ross) would be great. Trent would indeed be worthy and experienced candidate for just score duties.

You know its going to happen one day, in fact the latest seems to be that its on its way out of development hell and looking like a real prospect for some time before the middle of the decade (not that we haven't heard that one before, but still). Lets hope at least one of the producers will get to read this (Lily, or Lana, girls, I know at least one of yous got a secret account here, c'mon lets make this happen!), or at least that as much care is taken with the OST and score and any other musical content with the new one as was with the original.

If anyone reading this has suggstions, feel free to comment!

Sadowicz and the culture war

 

Oh shit, the inevitable has happened and now Twitter knows who Jerry Sadowicz is. He's had his run at The Pleasance cut short after complaints over his content. J K Rowling and the Freeze Peach keyboard warriors have come out to bat for him.

I've seen Sadowicz's stand up since I was a kid and have seen him perform recently too. He's also a brilliant personal magician and card trickster, he wrote the text books that you by if you want to learn stage magic. The shows are as he puts it "card tricks with 'patter'", the "patter" in question being the rawest, purposefully offensive un-PC, bunch-of-old-guys-on-a-building-site-level craíc, directed at his audience, other stand ups, anything else going on in the world at the moment and especially himself.

I have seen him tell the most racist and sexist joke I have ever heard in my entire life, an impressive feat for a 2-line gag.

I've seen him go up to a person in the front row at his gig in a wheel-chair and say "for my next trick I'm going to make this cunt get up and walk!" to their obvious amusement and delight

Apparently what specifically got him into trouble this time is calling Rishi Sunak a "Paki" and gettting his dick out on stage. Both those things are pretty much par for the course for one of his shows, he didn't do anything out of the ordinary and it seems like the climate has just changed.

As far as the whole "ironic racism" discourse and how this relates to it goes; yeah I get how the apparent "ironic racism" of online internet culture and sites like 4chan was de-subverted and just led to the literal and unironic racism that heralded a resurgence of the far right across the world. I get that this is a problem and should probably inform how we look at "ironic racism" in a modern cultural context even when it is sincerely ironic.

That said, Sadowicz is not 4chan. He is very much a product of analogue tech and old media. If you are buying a ticket to a Jerry Sadowicz show (which is pretty much the only way you're going to experience his performances these days) you really ought to bloody well know what you're letting yourself in for. As he talks about himself, he's purposefully cultuvated an audience who are capable of recieving his material in the manner intended. His face should be your trigger warning.

Personally I can't see this going too badly for Sadowicz. It sounds like the Pleasance was bang in the wrong and have been making shit up about their reasons for cancelling the second night (this wasn't a full Edinburgh Fringe run this was 2 nights, one of which was cancelled). He'll be fine and the lost revenue will be covered by earnings generated by the subsequent publicity. I'm more concerned that dragging him into the culture wars at this stage of his career is going to make him into some icon of the alt-right, the shows aren't going to work or be as much fun at all if the actual shitlords, incels and Dankula stans start showing up at them and clearly being a bit too much into it. I think we'll just have to see how it goes.

Jordan Peele's Us, discussion and analysis (spoilers, lots of them)

Please don't read this unless or until you've seen the film. If you're in two minds about whether to see it or not, go watch it. Its great.

Coming out of the film, which I'll say off the bat that I really enjoyed for the most part, I had a lot of questions. I don't have answers to many of them and I reckon a second pass at some point in the future may help but for now this is just a collection of thoughts rather than my concrete conclusions.

So, the biggest question I had was, what the fuck did I just watch?

Well, the plot is pretty mental, but its not nonsensical either.

From imdb: "A family's serenity turns to chaos when a group of doppelgängers begins to terrorize them." Thats basically it, a creepy twist on the home invasion scenario, then we get into the second act wherein it turns out that this isn't just happening to the family we're following, there's some weird apocalyptic shit going down. Everybody has a double, who in the film are called The Tethered, tonight is the night of the untethering and everyone's other self is out to get them. The family survives after a certain amount of high-jinx and having to kill their other selves, presumably to escape, but everyone else is fucked.

So that's it, that's the story.

But what it this film about though? Jordan Peele has gone on record as saying that there isn't a single detail in the film that doesn't have some significance. This is no more a film merely about creepy dopplegangers that It Follows was merely about a demon or The Babadook was about a haunted childrens book. There's a lot here that demands to be unpacked.

He's also said that the film is about duality, and yes that is the core motif that holds the film together visually and thematically but that on its own doesn't say a whole lot.

Well I don't know about the rest of you but coming out of the cinema I was mostly confused. I was expecting it to be about racism in a more direct fashion. From the premise I thought the obvious place to go, would be internalised racism, an actualisation of the conflict inherent to W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of "double consciousness" which he discusses at length in "The Souls of Black Folk" - i.e. the idea that for a person of colour one must adopt an almost schizophrenic concept of the self, both being oneself in the world while always being conscious of how you're perceived by the dominant white society. That is kind of in there but its not the main focus (unless I'm missing something, I'm not African American myself so there's a fair bit in probably not getting) as I had been expecting it to be.

Since watching the film I've seen a few interviews with Peele and he's said categorically that that isn't what is about anyway. It seems to be partly inspired by his own personal fear of Doppelgängers. Which fair play, is a creepy concept and works well. But obviously it has been loaded with a lot of symbolism. There are a few lines in there that are clearly meant to be ominous. When asked "what are you" the Mother doppelganger says "We are Americans". Earlier in the little girl of the family says "oh yeah, that's right nobody cares about the end of the world". So there you have the notion of America literally tearing itself apart while the younger generations fears for the future go unheeded.

When you get past the home invasion stuff and realise that this is going on everywhere that seems to play into the notion of social upheaval, revolution that classic gothic trope of The Return of the Repressed. When you find what The Tethered actually are, this horrible dehumanising thing that's also necessary to maintain the world that we know, one can't help but think of the exploitative relationship between the 1st and 3rd world, the fact that the most basic decent standard of living that the least of us enjoys is predicated on unspeakable horror that's always just beyond our field of vision.

The whole thing as well of The Tethered in their own environment: human beings just mindlessly going through the motions without real choice or active thought, speaks to fears about the atomisation and alienation inherent to modern living too.

I think there's another level where this is about trauma and mental illness. Adelaide seems to be suffering PTSD, The final reveal the final reveal seems to speak to the idea that real trauma takes away a part of who you once were. Through the set up she displays depressive, paranoiac and magical thinking. Reading profound significance into coincidence is again something that is not uncommon in people with mental health problems. That the whole home invasion kicks off just after her having that conversation with her partner is not insignificant.

Is there a connection here between the personal and political? I feel like the answer is yes but I'm not quite sure how.

Now all of the elements above are in the mix but none of them are the focus of the film. So maybe that's fair enough. Get Out was very on the nose as to what it was about. This isn't but actually, its cool, it doesn't have to be. There's still a lot in there I don't get like what the significance of the Rabbits or the Scissors are. I look forward to hearing what anyone else has to say and unpicking the various threads that have been so deftly woven in there. And what's with all the Micheal Jackson stuff? Well, at least we have that from the horses mouth.

If anyone has any alternative takes or wants to expand on anything I've brought up I'd be really interested in hearing it.

Edit:

A couple of good analysis vids on the film up now on YouTube. I liked the RedLetterMedia one because the lads were pretty much spot on and my feelings about the film over all are quite similar both in terms of what I thought was good and was critical of. The ever reliable Wisecrack did some excellent work teasing out some of the complexities inherent to the imagery. The overall take which was that as a film it is purposefully oblique and multifaceted enough to be meaningful in different ways to anyone watching it is spot on imo.

Blindboy Boatclub, the Left and New Media Celebrity Culture in Ireland

A long time ago I had intended to write an article about Russell Brand for this blog. This would have been about 2013/14 between the Jeremy Paxman interview and the 2015 General Election. We were at that stage more than half a decade into the crisis and while things hadn’t quite descended into the infernal quagmire we find ourselves in now they were certainly gearing up. During that time Russell emerged as a voice of a type of politics that is as old as power structures themselves, that has been around in something approximating its current form since modernity began and has always been there, though rarely articulated in the mainstream of political or social discourse. Also, the specifics of they way in which it blew up and other people reacted to it said something very interesting about the culture around politics and the media in general at this juncture in our history. As ever and to my own personal annoyance, in spite of the fact that I felt I had some unique insights to contribute to the conversation I never got around to laying those thoughts down in a coherent manner, which is inconveniencing me right now as there seems to be something similar happening right now in Ireland with two other public figures and I don’t have that previous work to refer back to.

So, failing that and without getting into the whole Russell Brand thing at length I’ll now sum up the salient points of this essay that never was, or as I see them the three features of what I’d call The Russell Brand Moment:

1) Revolutionary or even quite a lot of the time left-reformist politics are ruthlessly no-platformed by the gatekeepers of the mainstream media out of the general political discourse. On this occasion an individual circumvents the gatekeepers by already having access to a platform due to their celebrity status built in a long career elsewhere in the media as an entertainer.

2) This was assisted by a use of social media platforms as a way of bypassing said gatekeepers and reaching a wide audience in a way impossible just a decade ago and unthinkable in any other generation.

3) That said, there are limitations that we must understand, no point getting over enthusiastic. The individual at the centre of this is usually part of the movement and reasonably well informed, but about to the level of the average cadre, which is understandable, they already have a full-time occupation, i.e. whatever propelled them to their celebrity status in the first place and may hold contradictory positions; they may slip up on particular issues when called to voice opinions outside of their immediate span of knowledge. Added to that their no more free of any unreconstructed societal attitudes than the rest of us. It would be churlish of us to expect otherwise.

The 3rd point I had actually observed at the time and was bourn out by the trajectory the whole Brand thing took over the course of 2015. Essentially Brand fell at the first hurdle making the rookie error of seeing a modest shift leftwards on the part of the Labour Party as a new dawn in UK politics and backing David Milliband in the 2015 general election. In doing so he shot what credibility he had and retired temporarily from public life and the one man war against the media and political establishment he’d been on since the Paxman interview.  He’s been back since but that moment has tangibly passed. I’m sure he’s kicking himself now that the actual labour left has made a breakthrough, but maybe we’ll look back and see the Brand moment as a precursor to the ascension of Corbynism.

So with that in mind I’d like to talk about what’s going on with a public figure in Ireland; Blindboy Boatclub of The Rubberbandits.

The Rubberbandits

The Rubberbandits are two friends who grew up together in Limerick that go by the aliases of Blindboy Boatclub and Mr Chrome. They were early stars of Irish social media, making their name initially on Bebo and Myspace with a series of humorous prank phone calls. In 2007 they started making comedic hip hop and gigging a live show. In their music videos and while performing they both always wear a plastic shopping bag with eye and mouth holes cut out while their DJs dressed up as disgraced former government minister Willie O’Dea. Their first video Horse Outside went viral and took them from 'internet famous' to genuine notoriety. The humour of these songs has a certain off-the-wall sillyness and broadness to it, but like some of our best (O’Brien, Milligan etc.) it is belied by a fierce wit and satirical eye, the targets of which have ranged from the hyper-sexual machismo in hip-hop to ill informed armchair republicanism to hipsters.

By the beginning of this decade the Bandits were hot shit and have only gone from strength to strength, scoring TV work for RTÉ, The BBC, ITV, Channel 4. They had one of their songs featured in the new Trainspotting film and have played gigs and festival appearances up and down the island and internationally. Through all this they have managed a degree of relative anonymity for two people in the entertainment industry who are household names in a modern country. Their names are out there and can be accessed with a cursory Google but there’s only a single picture of Chrome’s face sans-plastic bag and none of Blindboy. Seriously, you can find a picture of what Burial looks like IRL easier.

More recently, Blindboy has authored and published a book of short stories, The Gospel According to Blindboy in October 2017 and started doing a podcast which was initially to promote the book but has taken on a life of its own, topping the iTunes podcast chart since its first episode continuing to do so through to the time of writing.

Through that time Blindboy has used his media presence to articulate the common sense perspective of his generation, using his platform to talk about pertinent issues if the day, mostly looking at them through the lense of mental health, sharing his own experiences to destigmatize something that’s still heavily taboo in Ireland. An early intervention was in 2006 when he spoke out against Bebo’s use of profile views, which he considered psychologically unhealthy to the point where it might lead to someone taking their own lives and called for the practice to be discontinued. This lead to his page being shut down without discussion by Bebo in spite of their popularity (the interview has now been reproduced in the feb 20th podcast God's Posture where he speaks about it at length). The evils of social media and potential deleterious effects on the psyche of the users and unconscionable business practices of the various platforms is something that we’re now all familiar with and has been discussed and analyzed to the point of cliché but in 2006 looking at that type of media through psychological theory was quite novel. He understood social media as only someone who grew up using it could.

He’s also used this as a way into the wider issues effecting Irish society, critiquing capitalism by looking at the socio-economic conditions which drive metal illness and talking about the psychological benefits for men of embracing feminism on the Late Late Show where he’s a frequent guest and expanding on these themes at length in the podcast. More recently he’s weighed in on the movement to repeal the 8th amendment. In a recent podcast he interviewed the film and TV star Cillian Murphy, who rarely gives interviews but had reached out to him to collaborate on some repeal propaganda, specifically orientated towards young men who the usual political discourse wouldn’t reach and might otherwise be apathetic on the issue. When the referendum was won by a substantial margin what most activists in the field have known for years was accepted, finally, by the establishment, i.e. that the pro-choice position had (in Gramscian terms) transcended good sense to become the common sense position. One can’t underestimate the role of pop-cultural figures in expressing and solidifying cultural turns like this.

Getting back to what I’ve proffered as the three features of the “Russell Brand moment”, the first two points seem to be fairly self evident based on what’s been outlined so far. There are differences though, he’s not been as confrontational or taken on the beast as directly as Brand had been doing, even now much later it still astounds me that Brand with his YouTube channel was in a running dialogue with the Murdock media empire and that he could goad them into responding to him on the nightly Fox news shows.

Also, Blindboy’s personal politics are quite different to Brand who consciously and overtly identified with the revolutionary tradition and specifically Anarchism (though a somewhat muddled and idiosyncratic one). Instead Blindboy talks about his family history in the West Cork IRA in the 1920s though he doesn’t identify with any contemporary Irish republican organisation. When he gets down to it he’s decidedly left-reformist, stopping a good way short of anti-capitalism though decidedly to the left of the Irish Labour Party. Which seems fair enough to me as it would put him about where most Irish people, and in particular those around the great social movements of recent history are at the moment, i.e. conscious and even proud of the republican revolutionary tradition, to the left of consensus politics on most issues and if not up for a full overthrow of the state, are certainly disillusioned with it as-is and yearning for change. 

Which brings me to the question of how should organisations of the left ought to relate to him? Is there a right way to respond to these figures that as they occur in the culture, especially since with the continuing prevalence of social media and the disintegration of the institutions that were traditionally the gatekeepers of the cultural discourse this sort of thing is liable to happen in the future.

Again, I’m sorry that I never managed the Russell Brand post because a lot that happened on the left in the wake of the Newsnight interview and subsequently is instructive. You had stuff like the “I Support Russell Brand’s Call for Revolution” facebook page. I will be generous and assume this was the work of one Brand fanboy who was an SP member rather than a party social-media initiative, but it struck me as a bit band-wagon jumpy and opportunist. Basically it was an SP member using the Brand moment to proselytise for his specific fraction by creating the page to share Brand content and SP content, often content specific to his local branch in Coventry. Now I wouldn’t want to pick on the guy unduly but I am singling him out as an example of people on the left getting overly enthusiastic and just being narrowly focused on how to further their sectional or even personal agenda without looking at the bigger picture, which ought to be inclusive.

Still, I prefer this approach to the churlishness and negativity that a lot of leftists and activists responded to Brand with. For those unfamiliar I’ll refer you to Mark Fisher, one of the few people on the left who at the time had what I’d call the correct take on Brand:

The next night, it was clear that Brand’s appearance (on newsnight) had produced a moment of splitting. For some of us, Brand’s forensic take-down of Paxman was intensely moving, miraculous; I couldn’t remember the last time a person from a working class background had been given the space to so consummately destroy a class ‘superior’ using intelligence and reason…. Brand had outwitted Paxman...

The moralising left quickly ensured that the story was not about Brand’s extraordinary breach of the bland conventions of mainstream media ‘debate’, nor about his claim that revolution was going to happen. (This last claim could only be heard by the cloth-eared petit-bourgeois narcissistic ‘left’ as Brand saying that he wanted to lead the revolution – something that they responded to with typical resentment: ‘I don’t need a jumped-up celebrity to lead me‘.) For the moralisers, the dominant story was to be about Brand’s personal conduct – specifically his sexism.

Rather than be happy that our politics were suddenly being articulated in the mainstream he was lit on for past personal indiscretions and problematic material from his old stand up routines. Now I’m not going to defend any of that, just saying that when something like that happens that this was a lot of people’s first response does not speak well of them as individuals or the movement they inhabit. It felt to me at the time that after decades of defeat and retreat and so many years in the bunker that a lot of these activists just didn’t know how to take it when something good happens. There was also a tangible element of jealousy relating to the whole thing. These h8rs were people who had spent years or decades in the trenches being patently ignored by the media. Seeing someone from so far outside their club, who is a bit of a clown, doing what they could and would have done if only they’d been given the opportunity. I can only imagine how that smarted.

And I’ll reiterate, its not like he’d done nothing, a lot of the criticism was legit to some extent. Nobody should be afforded a pass for bad behaviour just because they’ve done some good work. But, again getting back to Mark Fisher’s peice:

It is right that Brand, like any of us, should answer for his behaviour and the language that he uses. But such questioning should take place in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the first instance – although when Brand was questioned about sexism by Mehdi Hasan, he displayed exactly the kind of good-humoured humility that was entirely lacking in the stony faces of those who had judged him. “I don’t think I’m sexist, But I remember my grandmother, the loveliest person I‘ve ever known, but she was racist, but I don’t think she knew. I don’t know if I have some cultural hangover, I know that I have a great love of proletariat linguistics, like ‘darling’ and ‘bird’, so if women think I’m sexist they’re in a better position to judge than I am, so I’ll work on that.”

So far though there seems little sign of anyone of any significance on the left doing that to Blindboy. Partly this is because of how he’s been handling himself. Also, I’d put that down to the political culture on the Irish left as not being so hostile, unlike Britain four years ago we’ve not had a series of defeats, disappointments, organisational schisms and wasted opportunities to build a culture of begrudgery out of. Far from it. The backlash might happen, some of the stuff from the Rubber Bandits is pretty off the wall and if one were so inclined one could go back through his work looking for stuff you could decontextualise and paint as problematic I dare say you could nitpick enough out of it to make whatever point you wanted if you were so inclined.

But then why would you?

Which brings me in a roundabout way to what I propose as the right and sensible thing to do in this instance and in general: constructive engagement. When the political discourse gets opened up beyond the usual quarters of the activist left we should be in there, not just to capitalise on it for our own benefit but to engage with the people coming to it from that direction with our ideas and the good sense we’ve acquired through decades of struggle and also to be open to what we can learn from them.

One thing that I’d also propose is to acknowledge the immense potential someone like Blindboy has in overcoming something that’s been a bit of an issue on the left. Again because we’ve been on the defensive for so long we’ve got to a point where we seem to spend a lot of time concentrating on telling people what to not do. I think that having a vision of how things could or should be is also important if we are to get anywhere. It’s particularly good to have this discourse directed towards men. With the cultural revolutions and progress towards gender equality a lot of the traditional role of men in society has come to be seen, quite rightly, as oppressive. The traditional narrative of patriarchy has been torn down but we should do more to provide something for men in its absence, if for no other reason than if we don’t somebody else will. Jordan Peterson has made a bit of a splash doing exactly this. That said, depending on your position in the movement that might not be prudent or appropriate, so when Blindboy talks on the podcast about physical exercise, mental exercise and how one relates to the other, that is what he’s providing. In fact since the early drafts of this piece when I wrote the last sentence he has basically said this on the podcast in response to a listeners query about the Jeepster.

It also means to an extent acknowledging that while he does have a part to play in the struggle he’s not an expert by any means in organising or experienced in the practical side of the movement. So, when he does drop the ball, as in his recent comments on the Trump protest or letting his podcast guest Vincent Browne rabbit on in an ill-informed and inaccurate manner about the organised left parties in Ireland (including mine), that we at least have that in mind when we engage him back on these issues.

For now though, I’m just looking forwards to enjoying the show. It is a part of a national conversation that people my age are having in public that isn’t going on anywhere else and I’ll be happy to see it continue. I am interested to see where he takes what he’s doing in the future.

My Top Films of 2018 (Kinda)

My pick of the top films I saw for the first time in 2018 (which may or may not have been released in that year) in no particular order:

(Also please note that I have purposefully not linked any trailers as there's a few of these that are best experienced going in cold.)

Wonder

 It is not often that one sees episodes of ones own childhood rendered on the big screen in a full hollywood production and yet here we are. This was one of the first films I saw at the cinema last year and I don't think anything else really topped it, but then like the kid in the film I suffer from Treacher Collins Syndrome, I've never seen the condition in a film before so this film was basically made for me. I loved everything about this, not least that it had my home boy Daveed Diggs of the industrial hip hop crew clipping in it, of whom I've been a fan for quite some time and am enjoying watching him blow up at the minute. As someone with TCS I liked the messaging in this, particularly the scene late on where the kid who is sort of the antagonist is confronted and then you see why he is the way he is. I honestly think everybody should watch this film, the earlier the better, like they really should be showing it in schools.


Spring

 I'm not usually one for romantic films about young Americans abroad finding love amidst the beauty of a picturesque town in rural Europe, but this was one of the best written films of any genre I've seen in ages. It is legit a great romance film, a timeless meditation on life and love, men and women, sex and romance, the wisdom and charm of old world vs the optimism and cute naivety of the new, and also a boss monster film with charm, humour, subtle observation, real heart and some pretty solid SFX on what looks like quite a low budget. The lads that did this also did The Endless which is on Netflix at the moment, they are 3 for 3 in terms of making solid good films and I love their style and can't wait to see what they do from here on.



Baskin

I went on a bit of a horror binge after feeling somewhat let down by Hereditary, looking all the time for something genuinely unsettling. I watched a lot of stuff and some of it was good but never quite got what I was after. Then this came on TV one night and delivered in spades. Not a perfect film by any means  (doesn't quite stick the mark at the end) but it was a wild ride and got right under my skin as I was watching it and even thinking about the scene: "No, really look and tell me who else is here.... You've seen it. You've always seen it, running in the woods with grandma...." gives me the shivers.


Last Shift

Brought to my attention in a conversation between RedLetterMedia and Max Landis, I was very impressed with this. Proper fucking straight up horror that goes hard in all the ways a horror film should. Lots of nice gotcha moments, slow dread, some really creepy shit and unrelenting escalating intensity. Good stuff.


World of Tomorrow Parts 1 & 2

Two short films from Doug Hertzfeldt, in his  typical doodle-esque /  line drawing style of animation, now with some beautiful moving colourful backgrounds. With dialogue provided by his 4 then 5 year old neice this weaves some truly dank existential sci-fi with the whimsy and innocent optimism of childhood. Both parts are truly masterful, deep, hilariously funny and profund. This was the highlight of the (generally well curated) Belfast Film Festival this year for me.


The Shape of Water

Okay, it won an oscar and shit but seeing this and Get Out win big at the academy awards and beat off obvious oscar-bait and pseudo-intellectual garbage was for me like seeing my local team bring home the European Championship cup or something. Get the fuck in there Guilermo my son! Personally I'm a sucker for a good monster romance and anything vaguely lefty so this hit a few of my buttons, great central performances all round and a good happy ending. Actually an interesting one to watch in contrast with Spring for various reasons, for both how they are and aren't alike yet are completely brilliant.

Climax

The New European Extremity is still alive and well, one of the most singularly satisfying films I've seen at the cinema this year. It did its bit and did not outstay its welcome, delivering something truly unique along the way. There are no other films like this in the world, and its nice to be able to say that.

A Mother Brings Her Son To Be Shot

There have been some really excellent local documentaries that I would think are sufficiently good as films in their own right that I'd recommend them to anyone: No Stone Unturned, I, Dolores, Unquiet Graves and Massacre At Ballymurphy. No doubt we'll see many more in the near future. One could surmise  that since the 30 year rule now extends to the early troubles and we are far enough away from the hot part of the ongoing conflict here (which hasn't gone away you know...) that the immediate physical danger to its protagonists means that certain things are now accessible and can be said in public that we're ripe for a golden age of documentaries and books that actually tell the truth about what happened here. That said the best (or for me at least the most entertaining) of the current crop is this one, which is about what is still going on in the shitty wee estates on the edges of our metropolitan sprawl, the people that live there and how they live with  the local 'boys', the paramilitaries that are supposedly staunch defenders of their communities against Them 'Uns but are essentially just the same gangs and hoods that run 'tings on estates all over the western world, but in our unusual context. This was about a notorious incident in the Creggan on the edge of Derry and was tragic, shocking and very very funny in a way that is uniquely Northern Irish. Also a dire warning for the future that nobody else seems to be willing or able to deliver.

Best Worst Movie

Documentary about the legendary Troll 2 and the weird fandom that's grown up around it and the general social phenomenon of getting together with your mates and watching bad movies for the crack. A thoroughly entertaining and well made documentary in its own right worth watching as part of a double bill with the film itself if you've got company and that sort of time to kill.

Annihilation

Dumped unceremoniously on Netflix at the start of the year it kills me that this wasn't watchable on the big screen this side of the Atlantic. Boss special effects, lots of really dark creepy stuff and moments of beauty, in that grey area between art house and schlock that I love. This is everything Sci-fi should be on the big screen. Obvious visual and thematic nods to Tarkovsky, Kubrick and Alan Moore (like if you're going to borrow borrow from the best), yet very much its own thing.

Blindspotting / Sorry To Bother You

Two films. Two passion projects from directors with a background in hip-hop. Both star young upcoming African-American actors whose careers on the small screen in the states are blowing up into super stardom partly through their supporting roles on extremely well received situation comedies. Two films dealing in their own way with race and class, white privilege, gentrification. Both employ elements of satire to get their points across and are both incredibly funny, while being quite serious with some heavy moments. Both are masterpieces of modern cinema. Yet, one landed this side of the Atlantic with the hype and aplomb behind it it rightly deserved and got a wide cinematic release and the other didn't, and I can't for the life of me tell you why. If anyone knows do please fill me in.

A Dark Song

Absolute belter. As someone with a bit of an interest in though not a practitioner of magick this hit a lot of my happy places, like I've never tried doing anything like the stuff in this film myself but I know enough about it and the people who do do this IRL to appreciate that the writer and director knows his shit. Also nice to see some more great cinema coming out of my own country (albeit with and all English cast and pretending to be rural Wales). Does tone and atmosphere masterfully, big surprise for a first time director.

Mom and Dad

Yeah, we all loved Mandy but the Nicholas Cage performance of the year for me was this absolute gem. Picked it up from John Waters end of year list. Definitely one of the funniest films I've seen all year (is it just me or is it hard to find a good comedy these days?) again good sci-fi, nice central pleasingly Ballardian) conceit that's used to the fullest to explore something IRL and milk it for thrills, scares and dark dark humour. I look forwards to watching this with my own parents. (Not to be confused with Mum and Dad which I haven't seen yet but intend to).

The Untamed

Mexican cult cinema is really going off at the minute, in the wake of Guillermo Del Toro there is some really brilliant stuff being done, usually using a genre conceit to explore some IRL horror. Tigers Are Not Afraid was another one which was excellent and worth seeking out. The Untamed gets mad props from me for being an example of using a particularly trashy subgenre of sci-fi / horror with genuine thoughtfulness and seriousness. Would seriously recommend, best watched sight-unseen as its one where the less you know about it going in the better.


Spiderman: Into The Spider Verse

The very last films I saw in a cinema last year. I went in reckoning that it was going to be good. It wasn't long in before I started to feel like it was going to be the comic book adaption of the year, in what was quite a good year for that sort of thing came out thinking that it was the best comic book feature film  adaption of the current crop, possibly of all time and one of the best animated films ever full stop. I always say that the mark of a good comic book adaption is if it captures on screen the essence of what makes the comic good, down to the formal conceits employed. This did that like few others I've seen. The whole alternate universes being represented by different art / drawing styles is an old trick on paper (the earliest I remember seeing it was in 2000ADs Hewligans Haircut which is from the 80s but I don't doubt it had been done well before that) but this is the first time I've seen it on screen (aside from a throwaway gag in the otherwise shitty Hitchikers Guide film) and it made it a central plot point. That was cool, as was the brilliantly realised character work, the cutting edge animation, the meta inter-textual referential stuff that was just the right level of nerdy to please the die-hards endlessly while never disturbing the enjoyment of anyone else who wasn't in on it, the humour. Every element popped individually, and yet this managed to be more than the sum of its parts, even as good as those parts were.

Iconic Horror Cinema + my introduction to the genre

I came across an old 2000AD "Chilling Winter Tales" special of mine from 1994. It contains a short article by an anonymous features writer under the by-line Roxilla. It was a run down of their favourite horror films. Now these weren't deep cuts by todays standards at all, Starts with King Kong and runs through, Bride of Frankenstein, Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street etc through to the 80s, providing some interesting detail about the production and special effects along the way. Entry level stuff for sure but to a 13-year-old-me it was quite important and my first introduction to The Haunting, Suspiria, Near Dark and others which remain firm favorites of mine. 

Actual cover of that 2000AD Winter Special

Now the reason why I'm posting this is that one thing that always stuck with me from the article was the last paragraph: "Its sad that since Near Dark there's not been a horror film released that has come up to the standard of the 13 classics covered here. On the law of averages, you'd expect at least two cracking horror films in a decade. Maybe the classics for the 90s have yet to be made. Here's hoping that's true." 

Now, that's a bit of an exaggeration, by then Braindead had been made and some of the choices seem a bit arbitrary in retrospect (The Shining is a glaring omission for example) no doubt due to the limitations of the format, intended audience (I'm assuming there's no body horror or weird sexy stuff because its for kids / teens so no Hellraiser, Cronenberg etc.), a set word count, etc, but it does raise a question, what were the iconic, ground-breaking, trend setting horrors of the last couple of decades? 

Personally, I'd say for the 1990s Ring and The Blair Witch Project. Ring opened the doors of Asian horror onto an unsuspecting world, Blair Witch wasn't the first Found Footage film but it was the one that broke the genre into the mainstream, doesn't quite hold up today on its own as a piece of cinema so maybe not but as a method and a sign of where horror films were at at the turn of the century its pretty important. 

For the 2000s - 28 Days Later for bringing the zompocalypse survival horror genre up to date with aplomb and doing something new with the zombies and Martyrs for being both viscerally disturbing and thoughtful. This decade, I could be wrong but I can't think of anything that has been able to land with the sort of impact of any of the above. There's been some good ones and some interesting ones but I'm struggling to think of anything that's going to spawn its own subgenre or anything like that. The only thing I can think of is Under The Skin for being the first to bring an abstract art-house sensibility to horror. Maybe Get Out? Horror has always had an element of social commentary (sometimes unconscious) but that is very much what the film is from the surface down, while still being an effective horror film in its own right. 

Or I dunno, maybe the 2-per-decade premise was just a conceit to give a loose structure to the article and doesn't hold up at all under examination. Still, it was a decent introduction to Horror films, and while it wouldn't be defining of my taste in horror gave me a decent grounding in the history of horror cinema on which I would build later. 

For reference the 13 films covered by the article are as follows: 

King Kong 

The Bride of Frankenstein 

I Walked with a Zombie

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 

Psycho 

The Haunting 

Night of the Living Dead 

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 

Suspiria 

Hallow'een 

The Evil Dead 

Nightmare on Elm Street 

Near Dark