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I couldn't remember anything in previous books of Brink indicating the WASP-ish sounding Bridget Kurtis was Latinx, so found it odd to learn she grew up in the barrio and has a mum neighbours call Mama Dora. Turns out German-Mexicans are a thing.

Issue 59 contains:
Sooner or Later
Swifty's Return
Hewligan's Haircut
Zaucer of Zilk
Future Shocks: 60 Hours that Shook the World & Bad Maxwell
One-off: Breathless

Just looked up Bad Maxwell. Disappointed to find it wasn't a preemptive warning to pensioners about the impending sale of IPC's youth group to the Daily Mirror conman, but delighted to discover a Brendan McCarthy story I wasn't aware of.

Story's awful dreck, but McCarthy's McCarthy.

I'd give you one, Tips^*


* Offer of sexual favour conditional upon purchase of meal and drinks. Flowers optional

HIGH ART
LOW  ART

IS THERE ANY DISTINCTION AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN WHEN ONE ADOPTS THE FORMS OF THE OTHER?

For thousands of years, art was the preserve of kings and emperors and the only suitable subjects of art were the only things that stood above kings and emperors: god(s) and the heavens.

Kings and emperors sometimes featured in the art, but only to show their relation to and humble servitude of the gods^*. The Renaissance relaxed the rules to include the obscenely wealthy, but it was the late-19th century before the mundane was considered a suitable subject for Art.

The value system flipped^** and now the only art that deals with gods and their ways is the low sort. Defoe's literally about a god, Brink's Melancholema and Chronozon are gods (real or not), and Cade and the Sisters are either gods or their opposites.

Lichtenstein and Warhol put commercial art and pop culture in the academy, so comics occupied the abandoned high ground. But comic creators, omnivores that they are, can't let Proper Art go. As well as the examples above, last week's episode of Defoe saw SK Moore come all over Leonardo.

Comics have inherited art's former fixation on the elevated, whether that's gods or the privileged forms of high art, although 2000ad probably has as many fans as Bacon and Kahlo did in their lifetimes. Broxton quoting Bacon is especially interesting, given that work's history of inspiring low art that became high art ^***


* Except when the kings and emperors decided they were gods, in which case they would commission the creation of monumental works of art that desperately tried to convince the viewer that this act of self-deification was anything more than mental illness or the same social isolation that means nobody dares tell Mark Zuckerberg he needs to change the way he gets his hair cut.

** When the wealthy decided God was dead, the value system flipped and now the lowly are deified. The Art world is falling over itself to work a Grenfell angle into every exhibit and wealthy patrons are trying to live forever by coopting the exercise and dietary habits of peasants.


*** If Alien hasn't quite yet joined Nosferatu (an unlicensed pulp knock-off!) and the works of Hitchcock on the leger of schlock subsequently revaluated as high art, it's only the death of its director away from doing so

I keep wondering where all the animals are

In interviews, the writer, Jack Thorne, said he had to think very carefully about putting animals in a scene or giving them a line of dialogue, since that cost so much money. HBO money isn't Netflix money, apparently.

Four years since Force Awakens and Youtube has been a wall of videos complaining about Disney's feminist agenda ever since.

But Disney go to all the trouble of making an hour of telly with absolutely no women whatsoever^*, and are MRAs congratulating them? Come on, Incels - carrot>stick.


* Unless the character we can't talk about is female.

[trained]

Peter Oborne in The Guardian:

"I have talked to senior BBC executives, and they tell me they personally think it's wrong to expose lies told by a British prime minister because it undermines trust in British politics."

This is a great example of what I was on about earlier.

Oborne's been doing the rounds on this topic for weeks, now, slagging off every aspect of the UK print and broadcast media and naming individuals, much to the consternation of Krishnan Guru-Murthy.

This specific article opens with seven paragraphs about Sky News and names a presenter. Oborne cites another broadcast example involving Channel 4's Michael Crick and one from the BBC's Andrew Marr.

But what's the anecdote about unnamed executives chosen to be highlighted here? The public have been trained over the course of thirty years. Oborne's a Tory who wrote for the Telegraph and The Mail, but he's worth listening to:

https://boris-johnson-lies.com

Happy 66th birthday, you fantastic weirdo.

[Bag 50 Munros in total]

Bag 50 Munros in total ... some folk mange that in a couple of outings!

I know you like your scran, but this isn't going to help your weightloss challenge.

Communist

[that]

... the way chapter 2 is shot, cut and paced is more reminscent of the first Star Wars (and THX 1138). Lucas's choice to let world/character building scenes play-out with aliens and droids doing their thing without much, or indecipherable, dialogue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09VTanKXsWs

It plays like a silent movie. Although the score and sound design can't compete with that ^^^

[TordelBack]

The Mandalorian Chapter 2 is the most Star Wars '77 since, well, 1977, allegedly.

A friend told me that EP2 gets the fun action-adventure aspect of 1977 Wars better than the two most recent sequels, which focus so much on the King Arthur/Tolkien aspect introduced in the first two sequels the action scenes are irrelevant and unimaginative addenda.

I found a letter under a bush that argued EP2 was riffing on the ILM catalogue as much as 1977 Wars or Baby Cart. He was thinking of the [spoiler]vehicle chases[/spoiler] in every Raiders, specifically [spoiler]Indy vs Tank in Crusade,[/spoiler]^* and [spoiler]Willow[/spoiler]^**

If future episodes rip off Howard The Duck or Red Tails, I'll have to rely on fellow boarders to point this out to me. I wasn't going to watch this, but someone on The Internet said it was crap^*** and that made me want to see it - DAMN DISNEY AND THEIR GUERILLA MARKETING STRATEGY


* Favreau specifically bites on the gag where [spoiler]Indy has to duck to avoid being ground into the canyon wall[/spoiler]

** [spoiler]Not just the magical chosen child, but Nearly Fett's Madmartigan dual hero/loser turn in his fight against the hairy rhino[/spoiler]. If that's really Nolte underneath the digital skin suit, filling in for [spoiler]Warwick Davis[/spoiler], it's the most understated and sympathetic performance of his long career.

*** It's not - TordelBack will love watching this around the time the clocks go forward

Courtesy of Charles Lippincott

No idea who does Her Majesty's PR, but their services will probably be available to other employers very soon:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000c1j4/newsnight-prince-andrew-the-epstein-scandal-the-newsnight-interview

[if]

Why are they re-translating Asterix? What's wrong with the existing versions?

I'm guessing the original translations are copyright of the original UK publisher. Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge created whole new jokes and most of the character names^*


* That one's a clincher - does anyone want to read a version of Asterix where Dogmatix isn't Dogmatix, Vitalstatistix isn't Vitalstaistix, and Getafix isn't Getafix? Maybe the translations could be licenced too, but that would cost more money. UK readers love those translations as much as they love the art and stories, so if this decision is about saving money, it's a false economy.