bugpowderdust

The very apartment we rented in Tokyo is on a Japanese estate agent’s Youtube channel. It’s extremely odd to watch a video tour of the place you lived in for two years. Cue the Official Bugpowderdust Wife wailing “But I was sick in that toilet!”…

Go rent it, it was a great place to live.

So it’s, what, two months after the BNP Spitfire story broke? (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the short version is that they have produced posters and leaflets decrying immigration and specifically the loss of British jobs to Eastern Europeans, illustrated them with a picture of a Spitfire for a bit of that good old Blighty Battle Of Britain spirit, and were then comprehensively undone after basic research revealed that the Spitfire in the picture belonged to a squadron flown by expatriate pilots from, uh, Poland. Long version here.)
Pretty big PR disaster you would have thought - when even the Daily Mail is laughing at your attempts to complain about immigration, you’ve dropped the ball badly. Very badly. You’d probably want to change those leaflets. But not, it seems, if you’re the BNP. One dropped through my letterbox today. To begin with I laughed at it for all the obvious reasons, but then I started to think a bit deeper, and got angrier. To be honest, I don’t even like the idea that someone associated with the BNP has touched my front door, let alone actually put that kind of offensive crap into my house. It’s bad enough knowing that it exists out there without having it bought uninvited through the front door.
It did help raise my awareness of the local issues concerning race though - up to now I wasn’t even aware they were standing in this area. Before today I probably wouldn’t have bothered to vote in the upcoming European elections, due to disillusionment with Labour and a longstanding policy of sawing my legs off before I’d vote Tory. But I’m damn sure going to now. Well done, Mr Anonymous BNP canvasser. You’ve ensured that at least one extra vote in this constituency is going against your party.

biggest world tour in years?

that enigmatic interview in Warsaw?

actually putting lyrics to the new songs on the website?

is it twitching?

nah, probably not.

Old Big ‘Ead is very much in the public eye at the moment, thanks to the movie of The Damned United, which supposedly is a very good book, but one I’m not going to read on account of my ongoing vendetta against David Peace*. As Chris says: “It seemed that most people from [Nottingham] at that time had a Brian Clough story of their own.“. So here’s mine.
Autumn 1990, and I’d just started at Nottingham University. The local constabulary had organised a crime on campus awareness presentation, and were obviously aware that, given that they were competing for attention with cheap beer and the opposite sex, there was a very high chance of a very low turnout. So somehow they roped Clough into it, which was enough to get me, my new roommate, and a couple of hundred other football fans along. After a policeman told the increasingly restive crowd all about marking your stereo with your postcode, and other worthy but dull stuff, it was time for the main event.
I’ve no idea where Clough was with his drinking at the time. He seemed lucid enough, but he had got hold of the wrong end of the stick that night. He stood up, and started…not exactly berating us, but definitely being stern. The penny dropped when he got to the phrase “You’re all clever lads, you don’t need to go stealing”. The greatest English football manager ever was telling us off for crimes he thought we’d committed, and seemed to think that we’d been forced to attend this evening as penance. Oops. But then he took Forest to the FA Cup final that year, which kind of made up for the earlier misunderstanding.

*a somewhat pathetic one-sided vendetta, as I am sure he is completely unaware of it, or indeed me. But if he will have the temerity to continue living in Tokyo after I had to come back, he’ll just have to deal with the consequences.

The weirdest thing about this was sitting down waiting for it to start, and thinking that I was finally going to see a Watchmen movie after all the false starts over the years. The great unfilmable graphic novel, on the screen at last.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the background stuff is missing, the text pieces from the end of each issue that fill in so much detail (although a nifty credits sequence does a good job of dishing up the backstory). That aside, it really is surprisingly faithful to the book, down to the level of recreating particular panels throughout, with dialogue taken straight from the novel (Laurie’s mother is even watching the same episode of The Outer Limits at the end!). Indeed,  there were a number of odd little bits that I was skeptical about, thought weren’t quite right, but today I’ve gone back and checked and found them present in the original. It’s extremely well cast - Rorschach is superb, Dan Dreiberg and The Comedian just as good, and no one really lets the side down, not even the much maligned Malin Akerman playing Silk Spectre II, about whom I’d heard so much and so little good. Ozymandias is a bit thin and underdeveloped, but that’s a failing of the script, not the performance.

Of course the big divergence is in the ending. There’s no giant exploding mutant psychic space squid here, but a different route to the same conclusion. This new iteration makes sense, and the GEMPSS is fairly hard to swallow anyway, especially without all the clues to the missing artists that were scattered through the original but missing in the movie, so I’m not going to be crying foul over it.

Paradoxically, the film does so many things right that the things it does get wrong stand out more. I hated the art direction - why is everything so gloomy and grey all the time, even the offices of an international tycoon/ inventor / genius like Adrian Veidt? It’s like since the Tim Burton Batman movies this has become the default setting for all superhero movies, and it is frankly boring now, especially when, as here, the source material is rendered in such vivid primary colours. Compare the famous central spread in “Fearful Symmetry” with its movie counterpart and you’ll see what I mean.

The newstand was underplayed, and probably the one missing thing I’d like to see reinstated. Not seeing the kid and the vendor bitching at each other throughout massively lessens the impact of their final embrace and its acknowledgement of their mutual humanity, not to mention removing the theme of their relationship as a metaphor for world politics that was present throughout the novel. It’s also amusing that a movie so happy to show broken limbs and all kinds of physical nastiness skirts so gingerly around the sexual dysfunction of its heroes. I doubt if anyone coming to this without reading the book would have realised that Dan Dreiberg was supposed to be impotent until he donned the Nite Owl costume again, and while the story of Captain Carnage trying to get beaten up for kicks is kept in for laughs, the suggestion that Hooded Justice or any of the other heroes get an equal thrill from beating people up is quietly dropped.

We’re getting into nitpicking now but if you’re going to go to the trouble of using Hendrix’ All Along The Watchtower as Nite Owl & Rorschach approach Veidt’s Antarctic base to pick up on the original chapter title of “two riders were approaching”, why do you then change it so that they are walking and NOT RIDING? Still in the Antarctic, the book version of Ozymandias’s base features a large painting of Alexander and the Gordian knot, reflecting his somewhat, uh, unorthodox approach to creating world peace. In the movie it’s been replaced by an inscription of Shelley’s famous poem, concerned of course with the way history can undermine boastful pride - I wonder if this is supposed to be a hint that Veidt’s scheme will not work? If so, why would Ozymandias have it on display? It’s enough to do as Moore did and plant the seed in our minds without ramming it down our throats.

These are mostly just quibbles though. It’s a faithful adaptation, obviously done with a great deal of love and respect for the source material, and well worth seeing. Now I’m just waiting for the extended cut on DVD, or a six hour television version…

I met Death in my dream again last night. He was in a small supermarket with me, smiling like a talk show host and speaking in his slippery eel’s voice. That night Death had short neat hair and a suit that looked like it had been worn all day, just like any other man sliding down into middle age you might pass on the street. It certainly helped him fit in with the early evening crowd, all young professionals stopping off on the way home from the office to lay in tonight’s ready meal. I don’t know if any of these people were real, other dreamers somehow drawn here, or whether they were just props from my subconscious. Either way, no one paid us any attention as we walked through the aisles.
“Look at this, willya?”, he said, holding up a plastic carton of milk and peering at the label, “Look at the date on that. Gonna be no use tomorrow. Things expire so fast these days, huh?” He threw the jug down, and kept walking through the crowds, none of whom seemed to care about, or even notice, the spill. I saw the milk splash against a pair of expensive wool suit trousers, whose owner didn’t even break stride, and pool out on the floor, quickly turning grey as people tracked the dirt of the streets through it, like snow a day after it fell.
I followed him into the frozen section. A butchered corpse was laying on top of one of the open freezer cabinets, great swathes of skin missing with splintered ribs pushing up through the flesh on its chest. Blood dripped and froze on the shrinkwrapped packages of meat below. “Oh, him”, said Death, waving a hand dismissively, “He didn’t get it. Tried telling him a story, but he just didn’t understand. It’s tough, but it happens. More often than you’d think.” He broke off and spoke loudly across the aisle to a young lady pushing her loaded trolley, “Hello! How you doing?”. She carried on with no indication that she had heard. “Hey, nevermind”, Death said, elbowing me conspiratorially in the ribs, “I’ll be seeing her again soon enough anyway, you know what I mean?”. He carried on laughing down the aisles.
Eventually we came to the checkout. I didn’t know what to do, but Death gave me a meaningful glance downwards. I followed it, and found I had a full basket. I couldn’t remember picking any of it up or carrying it around, but there it was. “Put it on the belt, boy, it’s time to settle up”, he grinned, with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. I obeyed, and started placing the unwanted goods onto the black rubber belt, where they were picked up by a disinterested cashier and added to my tally. When the last one went through she turned to tell me the total, but Death got in first. “Now I’m going to tell you the secret, okay? You ready?”. Before I could answer he leant in close, his breath cold on my neck, and began to whisper in my ear as the supermarket dissolved around me.

I bought these just before we left Japan - CD racks designed to mimic a DNA helix. The kind of geeky cool that is right up my street, even if they are fairly impractical, with the top and bottom CDs being at a 180 degree angle to each other.

The manufacturers website is here.

Not long to go now till showtime. He sits in the dressing room on his own -he hasn’t had to share a dressing room for years - and waits. Sometimes if the layout of the building is right he can hear the audience from here, a low hum of anticipation that feeds through from the auditorium, but tonight he’s far enough away down enough corridors and turns that he hears nothing but the sounds he makes. The room itself is soundproofed, thanks to worries about temper tantrums being heard where they shouldn’t be, or impromptu vocal warmups making it to minidisc and then the net. They invite people in here to sing, he thinks, and then they try to shut them up. He looks into the mirror, and stares into the eyes of the man in there, fenced in by the celebrity cliche bare lightbulbs. Where did it all go right? he wonders.
The boss is here tonight, come all the way from his home in Jamaica for this big show, the last of the tour, the last of he can’t even remember how many nights at this giant corporate sponsored barn. He’ll be coming to knock on the door in a minute, wishing him luck for the show and carrying on like they were great mates. But he remembers the other nights the boss was there, other nights in other years where the arguments went on into the small hours. He’d been getting into his echoplex, getting into the idea of trying out other music from round the world, but the record company had only wanted more of the same. Just give us one more album like the last one, they’d said, something we can work as the follow up while you’re still hot, a few more nice tunes for the radio, then you can do your experimental stuff. It wasn’t in his nature to listen to that kind of talk. He wanted to do his own thing and he wanted to do it now and sod the label, but they’d got him at a low time. He was still feeling guilty about making more money from a record about his friend’s death than his friend had made out of his entire career, the drinking wasn’t getting better and he’d lost his woman, despite all his pleas. So he said yes, knocked out another album of acoustic whimsy, and yes, it worked, all over the radio, triple platinum, encouraging noises coming from America, now we need you to tour and tour again. Somewhere in all that the “experimental” stuff had got lost, and he’d never started using that new drum machine, never worked with the famous reggae producer he’d planned to. Even the new records had dried up, once he’d realised that no one in the audience wanted to hear anything new. He’d got what he thought he wanted, playing to thousands of people every night, but they just wanted to hear the songs they knew from the oldies station, and smile at each other, gently tapping a foot while worrying about the babysitter. Sometimes you can get what you want and still not be very happy.
There was a folk club he used to play here, on a roundabout up the hill, the other side of the mirror and forty years ago. Eleven quid a night, and a knife in the pocket because there was always some ned who’d seen you get paid and decided to wait in the car park. Idly, he wonders what became of it. Probably not there anymore, he thinks as he takes a sip of his branded water - not rum anymore, not for a few years now. Then again, he muses, some of these clubs are like cockroaches. Every so often someone shines a light on them and everybody pays attention, but afterwards they just scuttle back to the dark and keep doing what they were doing all along. A thought starts to form, and before he knows it he’s up out of the chair, picking up his guitar, and leaving the room. Down the breezeblocked corridor, past someone trying to tell him it’s not showtime yet, barging through the fire door on his two good legs and standing outside sucking in the cold clean air, heedless of the alarm coming from the sundered door. He hoists the guitar onto his back and heads off towards…he doesn’t know where. Maybe he’ll head up the hill, you know, just to see if it’s still there, maybe sit in if they’ll let him.

[I might need to explain this one. John Martyn died last week. He was one of the most…alive characters in the music world, and hugely talented. After an early splash, he never really made it huge commercially though (and I don’t know that he was too bothered about that). For the last decade or so, his records came out on tiny labels with ropey distribution, and a lot of worthy music probably went unheard by people who would have enjoyed it. News of his death set me thinking about an alternative history of John Martyn, one where he had all the success and fame, but maybe lost something else, and this what I came up with. It’s in no way based on fact, or to be taken as any kind of wish fulfillment or commentary on a wasted talent. He lived the life he lived, and the man said it best himself in a recent interview in Word magazine: “I honestly believe no man who has ever lived has had more fun than me. The second is that living full on is the best fucking way to do it and I would absolutely do it all again in a fucking moment!”]

Not a good few days for rock. First John Martyn goes (more of which tomorrow), and today some goon on Radio 6 spoiled my breakfast by telling me that Lux Interior had died. My abiding memory of The Cramps is my dad flicking through a copy of NME in, oooh 1989 or thereabouts, reading a piece on said band, and then looking up and saying to me, “You’re weird”. That, and this one, which used to knock ‘em dead at Club Zoo in Plymouth at about the same time.

Interzone 220 is blessed with one of the finest covers I’ve ever seen on the magazine (and I’ve been reading since 24).

As for the content, there’s six stories this time round. The issue kicks off with Jason Stoddard’s “Monetized”, a neat enough tale of a near future world where advertising is quite literally in your face. Presumably it was written some time ago, before the global financial apocalypse gathered steam, but there’s a nice frisson reading this story of uber-capitalism against a real world backdrop of headlines screaming recession and economic disaster.
Eugie Foster’s “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest: Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” is as bizarre and convoluted as its title, but in a good way. It depicts a vaguely insect-styled civilization, dominated by a Queen, where a persons role and personality are determined by the mask they wear that day. But what happens if someone’s mask is removed? This was probably my favourite story this time round, an exotic and unusual piece that is never less than convincing.
“After Everything Woke Up” by Rudy Rucker has an interesting conceit (a honeymooning couple who are able to converse with everything in the landscape around them), but it’s an unsatisfying story, perhaps because it’s not a story at all, but an extract from an upcoming novel. The novel might well be worth a look, but as a standalone piece this didn’t cut it. And even if it did, I’d always rather have an original story than an extract from something else as part of my table of contents.
Neil Williamson’s “Spy Vs Spy” takes inspiration from the MAD cartoon of the same name - two rivals locked in an escalating arms race with ever more inventive ways of gaining an advantage. Good fun, and the second story in the issue (after the Stoddard) to take a swing at social networking (wow, just typing the phrase feels so 2005).
Leah Bobet’s “Miles To Isengard” is a close second to the Foster as story of the issue. It’s a story of a band of adventurers trying to destroy some seductive but nasty world-destroying technology by chucking it in a volcano, which I guess is where the LOTR reference in the title comes in, but this is a near future setting with our band of heroes barrelling along in a truck. It’s a well told story, with a nasty creeping paranoia that scratches at the inside of your skull.
The final story is “Memory Dust” by Gareth L Powell., who has had a couple of stories in IZ in recent years (”The Last Reef” & “Ack Ack Macaque”), not to mention a few published in a book alongside your faithful correspondent. I liked this piece for its contemplative and almost retro Golden Age feel, a nice contrast to the savage technological onslaught of most of the other pieces in this issue. It loses points however, for unnecessarily echoing Gateway - I’m sure GLP could have come up with another way to set things in motion than copping the random jumps from that novel - and for maybe just being a little too short to fully carry the weight of the memory dust concept. Good, regardless, but could have been great.

All in all, another quality issue. Interzone’s resurgence under the (not that new anymore) stewardship of TTA Press has been one of the greatest pleasures in SF over the last few years. I really must renew my sub soon…