Shivering Sands: Seven Years of Stories, Drinking and the World Read online

  Umberto Eco: now there's a public intellectual. Here's a strange thing for you. Italy is about as intellectually debased as a European country can get. It supports five daily national newspapers devoted entirely to football. Its prime minister own TV stations. You whining Yanks complain about Fox News, but imagine a situation where George Bush owned CBS. That's where the Italians are. I think pretty much every English-speaking Italian I've met told me that at least one impetus to learning the language was so that they could listen to BBC news, the first unbiased news source they ever experienced. The current Italian election campaign is high comedy-if you happen not to live there-with Berlusconi pulling stunts that'd make Richard Nixon wriggle in his grave with envy.

  And yet Umberto Eco, professor of semiotics and world-renowned author, has a regular newspaper column. And he's not unique. Eco himself had said that he's simply following a tradition of Italian intellectuals speaking in public. In a country that mad, intelligent men and women understand that part of their job is to speak to the public.

  And we're not talking about mysterious pronouncements from the dusty depths of academe. Like the best fiction, this is an element of pure reportage: conscious people telling you where they think they are today and what they think it looks like.

  Today, for me, this ties into a query left on The Engine last night, relating to Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. The question was simply this: why aren't there any other books like this? From one angle, The Invisibles was a snapshot of the counterculture at the millennium. It was Grant's perception of where he stood 1994-2000 and what he thought it looked like. And, in commercial comics (putting to one side for the moment actual journalism-comics like Joe Sacco's bibliography or the work of Marjane Satrapi)-yes, for the last few years, it's been hard to find works like that.

  For one thing: frankly, doing any highly-structured piece of social fiction longer than 1000 pages just kicks the shit out of you. For another, you mine a lot of material out of the world, and you have to wait for the world to change appreciably in order to have anything new to say about the condition.

  On top of that, a lot of us have been taken up with the business of a new century: which is to say, there's been work to do in tying off the stump of the old century and getting a good look at it. And that's still ongoing business. Even now, DCs superhero title Infinite Crisis is getting its arms around DCs first century of operation, organising and understanding the myriad changes its story went through and attempting to settle its affairs before moving forward.

  This business of looking back and getting a perspective of a century in the medium, though, means that we're not moving forward yet (I restrict this to commercial "mainstream" comics, if for no other reasons that it's where the economics flow from and that it's what most of you are interested in). We're not in the situation of the '90s where people in the position of Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis, Peter Milligan are passing on new information and presenting new perceptions in the course of their work. In some sense, these were the "public intellectuals" of comics; people with something to say, who said it through story. People with themes, and intent, and knowledge to pass on.

  Of the current crop of working writers, Brian Vaughan seems closest to that tradition (if you want to call it that). In Ex Machina, he clearly has something to say about the American political condition. I think it's possibly an aspect of his particular take on things that it doesn't come out with a single direct clarity of purpose to me. It's hard to come away with a single statement from the work aside from "this is all more complex and more fucked-up than you expect"-which may well be his intent. As a writer, he's a terrific second guitarist on Ex Machina: in Ronnie Wood's phrase, "he knows how to keep a track cooking." And Ron was talking about Johnny Marr, so that's not a pejorative, you know? I don't think anyone's writing better cliffhanger pages than Vaughan right now. On a personal level, I'd like him to step out from behind his artists and rip out a big swaggering riff every now and then. But that's just me, and his modest, unshowy style (much like Greg Rucka or Geoff Johns) may be more suited to his time.

  I like that he's got something to say outside just working the plot.

  Especially in a period where readers seem to have mistaken plot for the whole of writing. Those readers are well-served by countless writers, many of whom have devoted themselves to mastery of the craft aspect and produce some excellent comics. I look for something else. I try to be something else, when I write Transmetropolitan or Desolation Jones or Fell. But, certainly, when I look for something to read, I want it to be something from someone who's aware of their world and is telling me something new about what's in it and how they perceive it.

  "Public intellectuals" is a clunky term with lots of weird baggage.

  But it'll do for this minute. Quit muttering and tell me where you think you are today, and what you think it looks like.

  §

  "Cultural leper" is actually a good metaphor for "comics writer" shunned by normal people, but leaving little bits of myself everywhere.

  §

  I PERSONALLY THINK I WOULD MAKE AN EXCELLENT

  President of Earth. Though I think I

  PREFER THE TERM PARAMOUNT LEADER.

  §

  Drowning

  Written in August and November of2007

  Most of the music writing I do takes the form of brief fragments surrounding a link or an mp3. These two are a little longer, but don't really constitute full pieces. Since they were written close together, and share themes (and one of them got listed in a Best Music Writing Of The Year book, even), I'm presenting them together.

  Okkervil River-"Iohn Allyn Smith Sails"

  John Allyn Smith is the real name of American poet John Berryman. When Berryman was a kid, his father killed himself outside Berryman's bedroom window, and Berryman grew up a walking braindamage case, inept at everything, a (scary-crazy) teacher too drunk to teach and a poet too drunk to read. He threw himself off a bridge in the winter of '72: missed the water and smothered to death on the frozen shoreline.

  "John Allyn Smith Sails" is the standout on the new album by Okkervil River. I've always been a bit lukewarm about Okkervil River -I figured that "No Key No Plan" was probably the one song of theirs I'd ever like. They tend to the musically unremarkable and the overwritten. The skill and ruthless wit of the first two minutes and thirty seconds, on their own, would make it a pleasant occasional play. But then they do something at 2:30 of pretty incredible ambition, that they shouldn't be able to pull off. They stop dead and then do two minutes of a rewritten "Sloop John B."

  Most people know it as a Beach Boys tune. It probably dates back to around 1900, and has variously been known as "Hoist Up the John B. Sail," "Wreck Of The John B" and "I Wanna Go Home." John B, John Berryman. "They both kind of wreck," says Okkervil River's Will Sheff. The other connection is Carl Sandburg, whose career as a poet would have been the long patriarchal shadow over Berryman's own, and who found and collected "Wreck of the John B" into publication in 1927.

  The rewrite ties it all back to Berryman, and it becomes this huge, heartbreaking thing, storming and shaking. It takes some balls, a stunt like that. I think they pull it off. I've been listening to it all night. You try.

  Burial-Untrue

  Ghost Hardware EP was as Ballardian a record as I've ever heard: the sound of a drowned London. "Ghost Hardware" is on Untrue, but Untrue is an attempt to turn away from the watery cemetery of the EP, to make a "glowing, buzzing" record. I'm not so sure that he achieved that. Like his eponymous debut, like Ghost Hardware EP too, it's head music, it's contemplative. The textures of the thing are incredible. The beats come from under the road, the breaks come from three rooms away, and some of the vocals come from over your shoulder and thirty years ago. People sing with the crackle of dusty old vinyl. The ghosts of old musics.

  I'm on the twelfth listen, and I still don't feel like I've nailed what this album is. Because I don't think Burial set out to make a funeral for soul mu
sic. But none of these lush R&B voices are alive. They're all haunting broken speakers. They're all coming from abandoned houses, the middle of empty streets, the floor under your flat where sometimes you hear someone tapping at the walls but that can't be right because no-one's lived down there in years. Vocals loop like the old stories of ghosts returning to perform the same motions night after night. The non-singing voices, the captures of people talking in the street, or even whispering, are way further up in the mix. I'm reminded of the oldstyle ghost hunters, training their mics on haunted rooms, and playing back the recordings to hear, under the bustle of ordinary life, the sound of dead people trying to make themselves heard to the world of the breathing.

  It's not as immediately doomed a record as Ghost Hardware EP.

  But it's not as benign a record as it wants to be, or as it wants you to think it is. Even the final track, "Raver," sounds like the 21st Century sadly closing the casebook marked "1992" and locking it in the filing cabinet of failing memory. Throwing it back to the ghosts.

  Stabbing Mars

  Written in June of 2008

  It's hard to get excited about robots. Unless, like a singer acquaintance of mine, you have what's termed a "clunk" fetish. Once a year or so, she asks me if I'll write a comic about robots fucking.

  I imagine she's waiting with ragged breath for the Phoenix Lander to stab its metal cock into the Martian regolith to see if the planet is wet for it. Sometime today, I think, the robot explorer will slide a probe into the rusty crust in the search for ice and biochemical presence. We already have the photo that may show exposed Martian ice for the first time-unless it's a photographic artifact, a trick of light and lens and no more real than the Face On Mars.

  Somewhere, Robert Zubrin is chewing on his John Lennon hat in barely controlled anger, or so I like to imagine. Zubrin's been advocating immediate human exploration of Mars for decades. He even costed out a mission, Mars Direct, using already-extant space technology, that came in at a fraction of NASA's own estimates. Zubrin's programme could have done it for the price of a couple of Hollywood summer tentpole movies. And, somewhere, he's hissing that the first person off the Mars Express lander could have told us if that was ice or not. He's had people pretending to be on Mars in simulated lander stations dropped in remote frozen locations for years.

  The problems with Zubrin's plans are many and various, of

  course, and begin with the fact that both deep space and the Martian environment are powerfully iniquitous to human life. Playing pretend astronauts in an FMARS tent in the frozen north is not the same as having to erect an anti-radiation shelter (or, more likely, digging yourself a Martian burrow) to ensure you don't come home as a tumour in a spacesuit. Nor is flying to your simulator location the same as flying a spacecraft nine months out from Earth's protective magnetic field. There is no test article for a vessel that'll stop you taking at least twice the human rad limit on your voyage.

  No-one seems to be listening to Robert Zubrin, who once allied himself with Newt Gingrich if memory serves, anymore. He plugs on with his Mars simulations with his eager faux-astronauts, and continues to hold gatherings of his Mars Society, which is taking on the pall of those other 90s groups of similar hubris like the people trying to build ocean habitats or intentional space societies. One of those, as I recall, turned themselves into something called the Living Universe Foundation and tried to buy themselves some scrubland outside Bastrop in Texas for a compound.

  Maybe that's an option for the Mars Society now. Buy some frontier land and ritually smash effigies of the radiation-hardened robot lander currently clunking away at the Martian maidenhead.

  §

  i want human bacon People in my house are annoying me and i has A KNIFE AND I STILL want human bacon

  Stop wriggling woman it's for Science and yes okay also bacon

  Washing off blood and making coffee

  §

  Bending Mars

  Written in June of 2008

  Is putting humans on Mars important? Yes. Humans need land to live on, and, in a dynamic environment, they need land to move to.

  Closed systems are bad because they remove options. A single planet is a closed system. And the thing about land is, as a history teacher of mine used to say, they don't make it anymore.

  Put aside the grim meathook future of our coming environmental doom for a moment. What if something drops on us? What if some natural freak event like a sequence of volcanic incidents drops us into faux-nuclear winter? We've come close to that before, in the 1880s. What if something no-one ever thought of happens to make human life no longer viable on this planet? Do we just shrug and say fuckit?

  I believe that exploration is necessary to the human spirit. But even if you don't share that particular delusion, I think most people would agree that any kind of extinction is bad. Except maybe for dogs.

  Mars is the best local option for setting up a colony and, eventually, a second life for humanity. It's a bit of a crap option: no magnetic field to speak of, cold as hell, and currently no guarantees of usable water. But Venus is a shithole, Mercury's a suicide trip and the Jovian system is a radiation trap. Forget everything you heard about asteroid habitats, it's bullshit. Right now, it's Mars or an extrasolar planet, and an exoplanet is going to stay out of our reach, barring a dramatic breakthrough in propulsion engineering, for at least fifty years.

  There has long been a movement to preserve Mars. It's said that terraforming Mars is nothing but another wart extruded from the human imperialist tendency, and it should remain the equivalent of a national park, unspoiled. The same people have said that if we go to Mars, we should "do it with class," eschewing nuclear-drive options.

  I'm currently working on a project written from, if you like, the pro-Mars Id. The chances are good that in fact there is no life on Mars beyond the odd super-tough bacterium. And while I did indeed just say that no kind of extinction is good, it should also be pointed out that giving up a bolthole for human breeding pairs-which are, make no mistake, the stakes on a Martian colonisation drive-on the basis that we might kill something less substantial and self-aware than a cough is no way to run a railroad.

  So my characters-and the dark side of my conscience-say what are we waiting for? Let us now bend Mars to our will (and I'm aware of the overtones of both "run a railroad" and "will") and fix the place up for human habitation. Let's cover the bastard in GM lichen and bugs, thicken up the atmosphere, drop a few nukes on Tharsis, do everything we can think of, fast and dirty, because the universe is hiding the stopwatch from us and we don't know how much time we've got left. Let's get a bit of air pressure happening, see if we can force out some of that water, do what it takes to at least get some overground stations into a safety zone.

  Because it's not doing us any good as a national park. And we are barely clinging to the surface of our world. And not through any fault of our own. Successful human life was a fluke on this planet even before we started poisoning ourselves. Playing the "we need to learn how to look after our planet before we go to another" lament is utterly beside the point. Think about your favourite art, your favourite memories, the best things people ever did. Does that have to go away because some people want Mars to always look like that quarry in Wales where they always shot Doctor Who episodes in the 1970s?

  Fuck the Martian bugs, one of my characters says. In forty years I want my grandkids to email me from a .mars address. It's not like we have to hunt whales or give a Tasmanian Devil face cancer to do it. It's just sitting there. Why not bend it?

  Seven Songs

  Written in June of 2008

  "List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they're listening to."

  These things circulate like a dose of the intellectual clap. "I fucked this
disease into your brainmeat. Confess your shame in public and then fuck it into seven other people." You find yourself looking at your friends and fellow-travellers, wondering which of them you hate enough to infect.

  1; "Denaissance"-Kemper Norton Collective

  I once played this on a podcast, but I'm listening to it again since Kemper included it on his recent CD-R. Again and again. Because it's joyous, in its own doomed and drunken way. It's big and it stomps and there are lots of instruments and lots of people singing and playing and just fucking daring the sun to go down.

  2: "Live at ICC. Tokyo"-Philip Teck

  Do not listen to Philip Jeck on earphones in a darkened Oslo hotel room at three in the morning. Philip Jeck's association by others with the emergent field/passing game of sonic hauntology is half-founded on the fact that he can haunt a room. I never really "got" Jeck until I saw him live-he creates a thoroughly supernatural chill in acoustic space-and I found this recording afterwards. Put it on my phone to listen to during my recent trip back to Norway. Usual hotel room insomnia brought on by sleeping alone. Pushed in the earbuds and pressed play. Fuck me, that was a mistake.

  3: "Late Night"-Belong

  Someone else playing with haunted audio: the sound of an obscure cover version playing on an AM car radio as you walk past it at night. Washed out by the ambience of 21st Century life. Almost but not quite lost in it: that gorgeous sad-smile chord change at the top of the chorus still comes through. It's a thing that makes me pensive.

  4: "Reed Sodger"-Clive Powell

  Yes, still obsessed with this, a couple of months after I first wrote about it here. It probably comes out of my current fascination with "haunted music/music that haunts." With the weird accompaniment of distorted and filtered instruments, it's almost like the clearest Electronic Voice Phenomenon you ever heard-the strong, sweet voice of Northern Britain of decades and centuries past coming back to us through the Doctor Who time-tunnel howlaround effect.