It’s forever being explained that this or that war or ‘conflict’ (a fun word to watch out for which generally means that the authorities and media recognise something shameful or unequal in the situation) is complex and difficult. But although the historical backgrounds, causes and contexts of wars are almost always complex, there’s one simple question that can clarify the course of events as they unfold: Is it ever acceptable to kill unarmed civilians who aren’t attacking you? If the answer is anything that essentially means yes, then the argument is ended and an eternal cycle of violence, death, reprisals and resentments is tacitly accepted. But if the answer is no – and to me it definitely is – then there’s a moral imperative not to let it happen.
Jean Colombe – Richard I of England orders the Massacre of the Saracen Prisoners, 1191 (painted 1474-5)
The part of the question that states who aren’t attacking you is crucial because realistically, escalating violence frequently ends in killing, whether or not that’s the original intention. Unless one is a Gandhi-style pacifist who thinks that being attacked is a signal to lie down and take it and that (to cite examples he used) the UK should have let Nazi Germany invade unopposed or that the Jews should have willingly delivered themselves up for extinction, the idea of being attacked and not reacting feels entirely unnatural, a practical impossibility, whatever your personal philosophy is. Not that that is any defence against most of the kind of attacks that happen in modern warfare.
Francisco de Goya – The Third of May 1808 (painted 1814)
Even as someone who believes it’s always wrong to kill unarmed civilians, it’s hard to resist applying that belief hypothetically to historical situations. It’s a pointless exercise though, because while it’s entertaining to imagine ‘sliding doors’ moments in history and extrapolate possible consequences from them, there’s no way of actually knowing how things would have panned out whatever the probabilities seem to have been. Plus, it can’t be changed now anyway. We don’t live in history, yet. ‘What if’ is an irrelevant and frivolous question when applied to history, unless you happen to be writing a novel, making a film or inventing a time machine, but it’s a fundamental question about what is going to happen today.
David Olère – The Massacre of the Innocents (1950s?)
It might seem obvious which war or conflict I have in mind while writing this, but although the most obvious guess is probably the right one, I’m not avoiding naming names out of some kind of misguided sense of neutrality. I’m not trying to downplay sickening atrocities or genocides or to pretend that war crimes only matter when some people commit them but not others. The simplicity and universal applicability of the question is the whole point. Is it ever acceptable to kill unarmed civilians who aren’t currently attacking you? I don’t think so. Everything is irrevocable once it has happened, but nothing is until then, so let’s not act as though some people are just destined to be collateral damage in wars as if it’s a fact of nature rather than the result of human choices and actions.
The prejudice against transgender people in the UK has, after years of furious lobbying, reached the level of a moral panic, and thanks to the pressure of the lobbyists (and perhaps even more, the money behind them) transphobia is now essentially written into British law. It feels like bad form to quote oneself, but four years ago I wrote “The unstated aim [of a moral panic] is the reiteration of a prevailing – often obsolete – orthodoxy … And coincidentally or not, whatever the panic happens to be about, it’s usually the same orthodoxy that is being reinforced and promoted.” That’s true here. The stated aim of the pressure groups – and now, the legislation – is to protect women, ostensibly from male violence, but not only does the law not do that, it actually reinforces the status quo, where crimes against women are often overlooked and always inadequately policed. It’s a policy that doesn’t try to benefit anybody, not even those who have rabidly pursued it – but, indirectly it benefits the very group it purports to punish; male abusers of women.
Claude Cahun in 1928 – “Neuter is the only gender that always suits me”
At its heart there’s a fundamental irony embedded into the moral panic about trans people. The heart of the issue is that there are people who simply don’t want trans people – primarily but not only, trans women – to exist at all. But in trying to wish trans people out of existence, what the transphobes are really doing is insisting on their presence, heightening it (and simultaneously making trans people a way of defining their own identities too) and of course punishing them for their continued existence. The idea of trans people just being, and being accepted as the people they are, obviously isn’t any kind of threat to society; but then, choosing an invisible ‘enemy within’ has always been the agenda of paranoid reactionaries and is such a familiar trope that there’s really no need to list the atrocities these kinds of policies have led to throughout history. Under normal circumstances, the trans women and trans men vilified by activists and politicians are just women and men; the woman who works in your office, the man at the supermarket checkout, a teacher, a librarian, a lifeguard. But when looked at through the eyes of the paranoid bigot, their very unobtrusiveness becomes sinister; someone ‘posing as’ a lifeguard or ‘infiltrating’ a school to pursue their malevolent agenda.
The worst thing about a law that denies the identity of a group of people is, naturally, the impact it has on those people, but it also does nothing to address the problems it’s disingenuously put forward to solve. Male violence against women, wherever it happens, is a serious problem in British society. And yet at every stage – from early displays of ‘light-hearted’ misogyny and harassment among children and teenagers to actual physical assault – society and the law tend not to take it seriously enough, with the result that crimes are under-reported and under-prosecuted and punishments are often laughably mild. At the same time though, harassment and assault et cetera already are criminal offenses, and they don’t become any more criminal, or any better policed, by persecuting a minority group. In fact, the opposite is true, since the focus on trans women as potential aggressors not only takes the focus away from the people who are overwhelmingly, the perpetrators of violence against women – cisgender men – it’s essentially misogynistic and threatens the very safety of the women it pretends to protect.
the late cis-gender, heterosexual musician Vinnie Chas in 1989 – which toilet should Vinnie have used?
It’s perhaps important to point out that the Supreme Court’s ruling states that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex at birth, so that only those born female are recognized as women under the Equality Act – it’s simplistic (human biology isn’t) and it doesn’t mention bathrooms at all. But the toilet is central to the ideology of ‘gender critical’ activists. Policing who uses which bathroom is a bizarre preoccupation of the anti-trans lobby, but it’s indicative of the generally perverse and in one sense unserious nature of their obsession with trans people. That being so, public toilets have ended up being a key part of any debate around trans rights in Britain. How ‘correct’ toilet usage is enforced throws up the immediate problem of who polices it and what the criteria are for using a gender-specific toilet. It’s not enough to say, as the Supreme Court ruling implies, that women’s bathrooms are for those who are biologically female from birth, because in many cases there’s no obvious way, short of an invasive genital inspection, of working that out – and there shouldn’t be. In any kind of free and democratic society, the way someone dresses, or the hairstyle and aesthetic they adopt – in short, their identity – is nobody else’s business unless they explicitly make it so, and setting up some kind of ‘toilet police’ can only increase the harassment of women, both trans and cis. The kind of concern I express there often leads to accusations of hysteria, but this week, the prominent anti-trans campaigner Maya Forstater explicitly said this: “Not being allowed into the mens by rule does not mean you have the right to go into the ladies. That may seem unfair, but these are life choices people make. If you make extreme efforts to look like a man, don’t be surprised if you are denied entrance to the ladies.” It’s hard to know where to start with this venomous nonsense. But for a start, what does “extreme efforts to look like a man” entail? What is ‘looking like a man’ anyway? Which man? These people come across like Mary Whitehouse wringing her hands over Boy George’s appearance on Top of the Pops 40 years ago.
The Beautiful Boy (2003) by genuine TERF Germaine Greer; but is this boy manly enough to use the Gents?
For some women, regardless of their gender at birth or their sexual orientation, just having a short haircut or choosing to wear trousers is enough for some people to accuse them of looking like men, regardless of what their intentions were when choosing a haircut or getting dressed that morning. The idea of ‘not being ‘allowed’ into one or other toilet surely also entails some kind of enforcement. There are so few manned public toilets in the UK that presumably, the current bathroom attendants won’t expected to take on the duty of somehow determining who is an acceptable ‘customer’, but someone will have to, if it’s not just empty rhetoric – which it may well be. But it also creates a genuine possibility of toilet vigilantism, which sounds hilarious, until you really think about it. And what qualifies someone to be a toilet police officer or bathroom blade runner? Is there a test they need to pass? Will there be gender-determining questionnaires or apps, or inspections?
The British cis-gender, female artist ‘Gluck’ (Hannah Gluckstein) a century ago in 1925 – which toilet should she have used?
Presumably there were, until now, no laws dictating who can use which bathroom and yet, men (including trans men) tend to use the mens and women (including trans women) tend to use the womens, without any resulting fuss. Somebody who lurks in any bathroom with the intention of assaulting someone is already breaking, or planning to break the law and nothing about this legislation seems likely to deter the few people determined enough to do such a thing. What seems far more likely is that people innocently needing to use public toilets – and it’s not something most people do except in the direst need – will face some kind of additional unpleasantness, especially if their physique and appearance isn’t one that fits the standard, traditional gender norm.
TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) is a useful shorthand term for people like Forstater and JK Rowling, but it also gives them a validity that they don’t deserve, because difficult to see any kind of feminism, either radical or orthodox, in a policy that requires women to conform to a specific kind of approved appearance to be accepted in female-only spaces. I would like to be able to substitute the term ‘right-wingers’ for TERFs, but in fact this whole issue reinforces my growing feeling that the ‘left’ and ‘right’ binary is no longer useful when looking at political and cultural issues. I am definitely left-wing, but then so, one would hope, is the Communist Party of Britain, which publicly supports the Supreme Court’s ruling. I shouldn’t be surprised though, because the mistake I – and many people, it seems – make is assuming that communism is left-wing. If I really examine what I mean by ‘left-wing’ I find that the correct word would be the much abused and misunderstood one, ‘liberal.’ And, as no less than V.I. Lenin went to great pains to explain in 1920’s charmingly-titled pamphlet “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, there’s nothing inherently liberal or democratic about communism. It’s easy to forget that, because left vs. right feels so logical, but history proves the point – if left-wing means what people think it means, and communism is left-wing, then the Hitler-Stalin Pact would have been completely unthinkable. Whereas, looking at Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR it seems not only logical but inevitable.
Uncle Vlad’s toxic 1920 pamphlet
Hitler and Stalin’s ideologies diverged in many, quite fundamental ways, but at heart, both were really about power – who has it, and who is subject to it and can be coerced by it. And as citizens of the kind of society that wants to police who uses its toilets, we might want to consider that.
But even though an attack on the trans community is an attack on the freedom and individuality of us all, and even with all of the serious issues and implications from the corruptibility of British politicians to the possible dystopian outcomes for our society, the most important point by far is to remember that this is happening now, and that the target is a small community that includes some of the UK’s most vulnerable people. It’s evil and it’s indefensible, but it’s not irreversible – so those who object should make their voices heard.
This article (like several others) came out of a conversation with my friend Paul, and he writes better than I do about 80s horror (and many other things) at Into the Gyre
The 1980s was, famously, the decade when pop culture became corporate, encapsulated in the omnipresent corporate or corporate-style logo. Obviously both corporations and logos long pre-dated the 80s, but it was in that era that it became an all-encompassing ideal. In the 1960s, the first really modern teenagers* had written the names of their favourite bands on their school books or bags and twenty years later their children were doing much the same thing, only they were painstakingly copying logos from album sleeves or tape inlay cards.
*you could say the 50s teenagers were the first, but they were pioneers; the 60s generation was the first to grow up with the expectation of being teenagers, with all that entailed in terms of pop music and rebellious teenage behaviour
As a young horror fan in the mid-to-late 1980s, one of the things that made the notorious video nasties of the previous generation seem so alluringly grimy and disreputable was their lack of slickness. 1980s horror franchises – in themselves a symptom of the decade of accelerated capitalism – even ones with their roots in the 70s independent cinema boom like Halloween – had logos, they had mascots like Freddy and Jason and Pinhead, they had rock songs on the soundtrack – they were corporate and, to young teenagers at least, they were cool. There was no way to make a grotty, un-theatrical, special effects-free film like I Spit on Your Grave seem cool. There was an attempt to make a franchise out of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but Leatherface wasn’t iconic in quite the way that Jason was, let alone an almost cartoon character like Freddy Krueger. Murderous, inbred yokels in rural Texas might well be scary but they weren’t easily assimilated into glossy hair metal videos.
the flamboyant 60s/70s Fellowship of the Ring vs its more businesslike 80s update
The publishing world was no different. In the fantasy realm, the hippyish typefaces and sometimes grotesque psychedelic imagery of the great 60s and 70s paperbacks were replaced with foil letters in block type and tastefully elevated landscapes. Tasteful is of course a relative term and within a decade, that utterly 80s look – a publishing counterpart to magnolia painted walls and a beige Laura Ashley aesthetic which married an almost clinical sense of restraint, as if embarrassed by the childishness of elves, wizards and dragons, but combined it with bold, business card-style, metallic sans-serif lettering – would seem just as trashy in its way as the more florid 70s fashions had at the time.
70s horror classics redesigned for the 80s
But, unlike fantasy fiction, where the biggest name in the 80s remained the late J.R.R. Tolkien, the horror genre had star writers who transcended the genre and became part of the pop cultural zeitgeist, Most of the current ‘big names’ in 80s fantasy, like Terry Brooks and Stephen R Donaldson, were writers whose key works belonged firmly to the post-Tolkien 1970s and never escaped a (very big) fantasy audience. Horror was different. Like the fantasy genre, its biggest names – Stephen King (everywhere) and James Herbert (especially in the UK, though his books sold millions worldwide) – had had their first successes in the first half of the 1970s, but as the 70s evolved into the 80s, both their work itself and the way it was packaged began to align with the spirit of the age. The fanbase for horror broadened until the big horror novels became the big airport novels and big supermarket novels and the basis for successful Hollywood movies. The books became bigger and more cinematic (but I talked about that here so won’t again) and their design more stylish, until they resembled the movie posters of the time; but with one major difference. There were of course iconic directors in the 80s, but even the biggest of them – Steven Spielberg, say, or Martin Scorcese – naturally didn’t dominate the posters for their films the way that Stephen King or James Herbert did on their books. In that respect, the authors were more like the star actors of the day, but where Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger were only one element, albeit a dominant one, in their star vehicles, with the books you knew that whatever you got would the real, unadulterated thing, unless you happened to be a fan of Virginia (“VC”) Andrews, but she was a special case back then.
The first, strangely romantic adventure-looking Shining (with Warren Beatty-esque hero) and the classic 80s Stephen King logo edition
The extent to which the star authors, rather than the books themselves, were the selling point, can be seen in their evolving covers. After a decade of disparate designs and variable artwork, often not especially horror-centric, publishers like New English Library, Futura and Star began treating books by horror authors as franchises, each with their own logo and aesthetic. Stephen King and James Herbert, to stick with the big two, demonstrate contrasting, but very 80s horror alternatives. James Herbert – who, with a background in advertising and art direction, took a direct interest in how his novels were packaged – went with the 80s version of classy as epitomised by mid-priced boxes of chocolates; a restrained palette dominated by either black or white, with lettering in gold or silver foil. They were eye-catching, moody and, to a teenager, adult looking.
New English Library offering James Herbert as a box of Black Magic chocolates and Stephen King as a hair metal album
Stephen King’s UK publishers (including Herbert’s publisher N.E.L. – but frustratingly, including several others; keeping one truly consistent image annoyingly out of reach) clearly realised that the selling point – the brand, in the parlance of the times etc – was King himself. To that end, the actual cover illustrations and even the prominence of the titles of the books took up less and less space, while the author’s name was treated to something like the logo of a metal band, and was big enough to be spotted across a crowded newsagent or bookshop. Sometimes the author’s name was in foil, sometimes it was embossed, but for at least a few years the covers of his main series of novels – as with James Herbert’s – had the uniformity of a corporate identity.
Stephen King’s Greatest Hits
Where the genre’s biggest stars and their publishers led, others followed; all of the big names of 80s horror tended to follow either the King or the Herbert approach; after wildly variable and sometimes lamentable 70s editions, Ramsey Campbell’s books took on the sleek, Herbertian image. American blockbuster authors like Dean R Koontznd Peter Straub’s books tended to follow the King blueprint.
80s gore (Richard Laymon & Shaun Hutson) vs 80s slickness (Shaun Hutson & Ramsey Campbell)
Gore authors had a kind of niche of their own. The early books of the UK’s most notorious horror author of the era, Shaun Hutson, played down the author’s name in favour of a gaudy movie poster look with the titles in a distinctive ‘slug trail’ font – and his US counterpart Richard Laymon’s works were very similarly packaged (the covers above both look like they could be the work of Danny Flynn, mentioned here, though I haven’t checked). As the sales of both authors increased during the boom years of the 80s, their packaging became – like their work – relatively more sophisticated. In the UK, Sphere mimicked the classy Herbert look for Hutson’s later 80s novels like Assassin and Victims, with the author’s name (embossed, in foil) becoming more of a focal point, while Laymon’s name became almost as logo-like as Stephen King’s. Laymon was far from alone in this. The brand-like identity of Stephen King, and the sheer volume of his sales, meant that the classic ‘logo’ look of his books was highly influential, to put it mildly. The range of King-influenced cover art ranges from the definitely ‘post-King’ 80s covers of authors like John Farris and Rex Miller, to the frankly imitative NEL covers for Stephen Laws, whose 80s books bring to mind the theoretical “Moron in a hurry” cited in court in cases of trademark infringement; not that said moron would have a bad time if they accidentally bought a Stephen Laws novel – but they would know they weren’t reading Stephen King.
the other Stephen of 80s horror
In almost all respects, Clive Barker was the outsider in the world of 80s horror – most definitely of it, but not defined by it. His debut novel The Damnation Game was initially packaged as typical mid-80s horror stodge but graduated, as his reputation grew, to Stephen King style packaging, even as Sphere Books simultaneously took the bold step of publishing his Books of Blood short story collections with Barker’s own fantastical (and in come cases gory) paintings on the covers, immediately putting the author in a dangerous-looking category of his own. Clive Barker’s books looked both more graphic and more outlandish than the usual blockbuster horror authors. From then until the end of the horror boom his work coexisted in the two camps of mainstream and (for want of a better world) alternative horror. The packaging of the 1989 first edition of his short novel Cabal (filmed as Nightbreed) is pure, commercial 80s design; it looks more like a movie poster than the actual Nightbreed movie poster and is complete with logo-like title and gold foil for the author’s name. But around the same time, his dark fantasy masterpiece Weaveworld featured a more imaginative, sophisticated style, taking its lead from the Books of Blood. Weaveworld had a more formal design sense that was flexible enough to be applied to the rest of Barker’s oeuvre, so that when the horror bubble burst and everything 80s suddenly looked as cringingly tacky and dated as mullets and shoulder pads, Barker’s brand alone among his horror peers easily made the transition into the new decade.
Clive Barker as standard 80s horror author, blockbuster 80s horror author (x 2) weirdo 80s horror author and weird-but-classy fantasy author
From 1990 until at least until the turn of the millennium, Stephen King’s publishers experimented with everything from tasteful minimalism to gaudy dayglo colours, the only constant being the prominence of the author’s name on the covers. That sense of immediate brand recognition dissolved around the time of The Dark Half has never been quite as strong since, and an 80s Stephen King collection still has a satisfyingly coherent look that isn’t matched by later editions. James Herbert mostly stuck with the ‘classy’ look of his late 80s books but with a sense of diminishing returns as the titles and cover images became less confrontational and the whole look less fashionable. In the 90s, much of what had been packaged as full-blooded horror tended to be given more of a fashionable ‘urban thriller’ look, just as in cinema, the Freddy and Jason franchises limped to an ignoble (if temporary) end, Hannibal Lecter emerged as a supposedly less cheesy horror villain and nobody wanted hair metal on their soundtracks anymore. It was a new age.
Slugs (1982) vs Slugs (2016) – eventually even the ultimate 80s trash schlock horror novel would be given the ‘tasteful’ treatment (which to be fair does look kind of cool)
Kind of shocked to discover that I haven’t done any of my once-regular Play for Today roundups since 2019! Last time around, rather than doing a proper playlist, I just mentioned some interesting things that had come my way (that I didn’t review for any magazines or websites), so I’ll do that again, possibly interspersed with things I’ve been playing a lot (in fact not; maybe later). These are all from the past few months and I haven’t necessarily given them the time they deserve, but I think they’re all worth a listen…
I loved Nechochwen’s Heart of Akamon and was quite shocked to find it’s now a decade old. They’ve released good music since then, notably a split album with Panopticon, but spelewithiipi (catchy name!) really reminded me of just how much I loved Heart of Akamon. For those who haven’t come across them, Nechochwen are an acoustic dark folk band (sometimes including metal elements, I kind of prefer when they don’t but it’s all good) that explores (as they put it) ‘the indigenous roots and history of the Upper Ohio River Valley.’ Their music is autumnal and haunting, and I love the imagery too. spelewithiipi is a beautiful album, and it’ll sound even better later in the year.
Ghost World have made some of my favourite albums; I was immediately smitten with their 2017 debut album, which was my album of the year that year and at first the 2018 follow-up, Spin was disappointing to me, but ultimately went on to be one of my all-time (so far) favourite albums, so there’s some kind of lesson there. Anyway, Armadillo Café is an odd, whimsical but lovely concept album that so far is taking longer for me to absorb, but it’s full of good tunes and I’m confident that I’ll end up loving it without even noticing again.
Hmm. I gave this a go because, despite the fact that industrial metal is one of my least favourite genres of music in the world, Swiss black metal has a special place in my heart and LADLO is a very dependable label. And..? Well, not exactly my cup of tea, but it’s good, there’s a nice chaotic, noisy atmosphere and it reminded me at times of Abigor (who I do like) and Blacklodge (who I occasionally like). The atmospheres and the choral bits are really cool and the noisy stuff with sirens etc is impressively alarming, though not nice if you have a headache.
Kati Rán – LYS (10 Year Anniversary) (Svart Records)
More ‘dark folk’ (“Nordic/Pagan” this time, though Kati herself is Dutch I think) – LYS is an album that I very much enjoyed when it came out and then pretty much forgot about, so it’s nice to hear it again and find that it really is lovely. She’s an amazing multi-instrumentalist and even though I have no idea if the music would sound at all familiar to the Nordic peoples of centuries ago, I feel like it evokes those ancient times and cultures perfectly for a modern audience (i.e. me). The follow-up, ‘SÁLA’ came out last year and I still didn’t get around to hearing it, but now that I’ve had this reminder I will
BOOTSY COLLINS – Album of the Year #1 Funkateer (Bootzilla/Roc Nation)
I reviewed this for Spectrum Culture so won’t say much about it here, but in these tense and miserable times, Bootsy’s indefatigable enthusiasm and uplifting silliness are more welcome than ever. Plus it’s just a really good album. The man’s a genius.
the poster for Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing (1988)
I don’t believe in the death penalty. In this, I’m in the majority, globally. I’m not sure when exactly I became against it; until at least the age of 12 I was pretty much a proto-fascist with an ‘eye-for-an-eye’ sense of justice, as boys tended to be in those days and for all I know still are. But I know that by the time I saw Krzysztof Kieslowski’s brilliantly grim A Short Film About Killing (Krótki film o zabijaniu) when I was 16 or so I was already anti-death penalty and have remained so ever since.
My reasons are, typically, kind of pedantic. There are many obvious arguments against it; there’s the ‘what if you accidentally kill the wrong person’ argument and that’s a pretty strong one – it has happened and does happen and is irreversible. There’s the fact that the death penalty seems to have a negligible effect on the crime rate. In fact, countries with the death penalty on the whole seem to have more rather than less murders (not that there’s necessarily a link between those two things). Even from the coldest and most reptilian, utilitarian point of view of getting rid of the problem of prison overcrowding, any possible benefit is negated by the fact that in most countries with the death penalty, prisoners spend years on death row being fed and housed, rather than being quickly and efficiently ‘processed.’ There’s also the Gandalfian(!) argument from The Lord of the Rings; “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” This wasn’t just a handy deus ex machina because Tolkien needed Gollum to survive in order to destroy the ring. It was that, but Tolkien was also a devout and serious Christian and that was his moral outlook. Thank the gods that unlike his friend CS Lewis, he deliberately left religion out of his books though! In the Biblical commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill, the Christian/Jewish god doesn’t list any exceptions or mitigating circumstances – in that one instance. Of course elsewhere in the Bible there are many circumstances where humans killing humans is considered appropriate and even righteous – the ultimate irony being that Jesus, kind of like an anti-Gollum, has to suffer death through violence to achieve his purpose. Religion is odd; but I’m not a Christian or Jew.
All of those points are relevant, but for me personally, it’s far simpler than that; if you can be legally killed, that means that in the eyes of the state there’s essentially nothing wrong with killing people. I think there is, and I don’t think that it should just be a matter of having the right paperwork. In essence, to kill a murderer is not telling them ‘what you did is wrong‘ so much as ‘you did it wrong‘ which I don’t think is a minor difference. And on top of that, there’s the whole question of who you are handing this responsibility of life and death to. I have a lot of respect for some lawyers, attorneys, judges, police officers etc, but there are others that I wouldn’t trust with my lunch, let alone my (or anyone else’s) life. States have a character, and often it is institutionally biased regarding race, class, gender and sexuality. Giving that kind of power within that kind of framework seems likely to make far more problems than it solves. But even in non-death-penalty countries like the UK we routinely give people the legal right to take other people’s lives, all they have to do is join the armed forces.
British volunteers in the International Brigade, 1937
I’m no more consistent than anyone else and my attitudes have their exceptions and contradictions. I (predictably) don’t philosophically differentiate between the military and mercenaries, because what ‘serving your country’ means in practical terms is carrying out whatever the policy of your government is that week, with no certainty that it won’t be contradicted by a new policy (or a new government) the next week and if enemies suddenly turn out to be allies or vice versa, the dead remain dead. That said – here’s the contradiction – I’m not a pacifist absolutist either, and I think, or like to think that if an invading army arrived in my country I’d take arms against it. These things are particular though; everyone likes to think they’d fight for a good cause, but the Spanish Civil War stands out for the number of anti-fascist fighters from all over the world who took up arms in defence of Spain. But that happened partly because so many people were ready to – and wanted to fight. Many of those – George Orwell is a prominent and typical example – belonged to the generation who had been just too young to fight in World War One and whose feelings about war – including a considerable amount of survivor’s guilt – had been shaped by it. And the fascist attack on the Spanish republic gave them a clear-cut situation to intervene in, in a way that the more political rise of fascism in Italy and Germany didn’t.
But anyway, the death penalty. People of course do terrible things, but although lots of them are significantly more horrific than a lethal injection or the electric chair, the end result is the same. Being – odd, brief segue but bear with me, it’s relevant – a fan of black metal music, the subject of death and murder is one you come across in a different way from just being, say, a fan of horror movies. Because the poser-ish ‘darkness’ of black metal spills over (though less than it used to) into ‘real life,’ almost as if the kind of art you make bears some relation to the kind of person you are. I won’t go into the tedious-but-fascinating Lords of Chaos stuff about Mayhem & Burzum or Absurd because it’s not quite relevant here, but the story of Smutak (Pavel Selyun) who ran Morak Production record label in Belarus is.
In 2012 Selyun discovered that his wife, the artist and singer Frozendark (Victoria Selyunova) was having an affair with the artist, zine editor and musician Kronum (Alexey Vladimirovich Utokva). Sticking with the psuedonyms seems appropriate, so anyway; Smutak murdered both Frozendark and Kronum, dismembered them and was apprehended on the Subway three days later with Kronum’s head (or skull; same difference I suppose – some accounts say he boiled the head – I don’t need to know) in a bag. After his arrest, he was imprisoned in Minsk and after a confession gained under torture and the failure of various appeals he was executed two years later, by being shot in the back of the head. A horrible postscript that demonstrates how the death penalty punishes the innocent as well as the guilty; after the execution the authorities failed to hand over Smutak’s body to his mother or tell her where he’s buried, the case was handed to the UN Court of Human Rights.
Not many people (and certainly not me) would say that Selyun didn’t ‘deserve’ his treatment. But still. He possibly tortured and definitely killed people and then was tortured and killed. There is a kind of balance there, but it’s one in which the act of torturing and killing itself is made neutral. Whoever tortured and killed Smutak doesn’t need any kind of defence because they did it in the name of the law, but the idea that torturing and killing is morally neutral because you don’t have any emotional investment in the act is an odd one. Smutak had nothing to gain from his actions other than some kind of horrible satisfaction. The person or people who did the same to him got paid for it. Which is morally, what? Better? He reportedly felt the same kind of fear as his victims; well good, I guess, but that did nothing to benefit the victims. It may have pleased the victims’ relatives but I wouldn’t want to examine that kind of pleasure too closely.
The current case of Luigi Mangione is far stranger. It’s the only time I can recall that the supporters (in this case I think ‘fans’ would be just as correct a word) of someone accused of murder want the suspect to be guilty rather than innocent. Whether they would still feel that way if he looked different or had a history of violent crime or had a different kind of political agenda is endlessly debatable, but irrelevant. It looks as if the State will be seeking the death penalty for him and for all the reasons listed above I think that’s wrong. But assuming that he’s guilty, which obviously one shouldn’t do (and if he isn’t, Jesus Christ, good luck getting a fair trial!) Mangione himself and some of his fans, should really be okay with it. If he is guilty, he hasn’t done anything to help a single person to get access to healthcare or improve the healthcare system or even effectively protested against it in a way that people with political power can positively react to. UnitedHealthcare still has a CEO, still has dubious political connections and still treats people very badly. That doesn’t mean that it’s an unassailable monolith that can never be changed, but clearly removing one figurehead isn’t how it can be done.
But more to the point; why does the killer (assuming their motives are the ones that are being extrapolated from the crime) care anyway? If actually shooting someone dead in the street is okay, then surely being indirectly responsible for the misery and possible deaths of others is barely even a misdemeanour. It amounts to the kind of Travis Bickle movie logic I’m sure I’ve sneered about elsewhere; complaining about the decay of social values and then committing murder is not reducing the sum total of social decay, it’s adding to it. A society where evil CEOs are shot dead in the street is a society where human beings are shot dead in the streets and that becoming acceptable is not likely to be the pathway to a more just, equal or happy society.
Michael Haneke’s disturbing Benny’s Video (1992)
What the death penalty does do, and probably a key part of why it’s still used in some countries, is offer a punishment that seems (in the case of murder at least) to fit the crime. Interestingly, public executions – which counterintuitively seem to have no better track record as a deterrent than any other kind – are now vanishingly rare. Part of that is no doubt to do with public disgust and part with institutional secrecy and shame, but I imagine that part of it is also the fear that the public would enjoy it too much. I’m not sure if I would think that if it wasn’t for the spate of Islamic State beheadings that were so widely watched on the internet back in the early 2010s (was it?) I watched one, like most people seem to have, and still wish I hadn’t; but you can’t un-ring a bell. That was at the back of my mind when I wrote about saints and martyrdom for this site and I can bring images of it to mind horribly easily. But even before that it shouldn’t have surprised me – like many other teenage horror movie fans in the pre-internet era I watched exploitation videos like Face of Death that featured executions, accidents etc, and in doing so realised that I was a horror fan and not whatever fans of that are. I should have learned my lesson there, but it’s undeniable that these things have a murky kind of fascination; since then, thanks to one of my favourite writers, Georges Bataille, I’ve ended up reading about Lingchi (‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’) and looking at the chilling and depressing photos of it, been appalled by postcards of lynchings, seen revolting photographs of soldiers’ desecrated bodies and murder victims… I haven’t gotten used to those images and I hope I never will. Teenage me would no doubt sneer at that because he thought that things that are ‘dark’ are cool, but that seems like a laughable and childish attitude to me now, so I can take his sneering. I seem to be edging towards the point that Michael Haneke is making in Funny Games (1997), which I find a bit tiresome and preachy (even more so the remake), but I’m not. I disagree with the premise of that film because I do think there’s a difference between fictional horror and real horror, and that enjoying one isn’t the same as enjoying the other. I think his 1992 film Benny’s Video makes a similar but much more subtle and complex point far better.
Imprisonment (whatever your views on the justice system) is a pretty unsatisfactory solution for most crimes, but it’s difficult to think of a better one which doesn’t essentially exonerate the kind of behaviour we want to characterise as abnormal or criminal. Stealing from a thief is obviously ‘justice’ in the eye-for-an-eye sense, but as a punishment it’s laughable. Raping a rapist would be grotesque and double the number of rapists in the room every time it happened. But even so, it’s never going to be comfortable that the tax payer is contributing to the relative comfort of someone like (I’ll only mention dead ones, this isn’t a complaint about the legal system being soft on psychopaths) Fred West. A solution l think I might suggest is one which I’m very dubious about myself from lots of different humanitarian, psychological and philosophical points of view; why not offer (and that word alone would make people angry) ‘monsters’ – the kind of killers in a category of their own, who admit to horrendous acts of murder and torture and whose guilt is not in doubt – those who will never be allowed freedom – the choice of a lethal injection rather than life imprisonment? That’s a horrible thing to contemplate, but then so is paying for the meals and upkeep of someone like Ian Brady, especially when he essentially had the last laugh, exercising his little bit of power over the families of his victims and having his self-aggrandising bullshit book The Gates of Janus published.
Anyway, that last part was kind of icky and uncomfortable, but so it should be – the whole subject is. So for what it’s worth, those are my thoughts on the death penalty. Time for a shower; until next time, don’t murder anyone please.
Everybody has their comforts, but after trying to analyse some of my own to see why they should be comforting I’ve pretty much come up with nothing, or at least nothing really to add to what I wrote a few years ago; “comforting because it can be a relief to have one’s brain stimulated by something other than worrying about external events.” But that has nothing to do with what it is that makes the specific things comforting. Like many people, I have a small group of books and films and TV shows and so on that I can read or watch or listen to at almost any time, without having to be in the mood for them, and which I would classify as ‘comforting.’ They aren’t necessarily my favourite things, and they definitely weren’t all designed to give comfort, but obscurely they do. But what does that mean or signify? I’ve already said I don’t know, so it’s not exactly a cliffhanger of a question, but let’s see how I got here at least.
I’ve rewritten this part so many times: but in a way that’s apposite. I started writing it at the beginning of a new year, while wars continued to rage in Sudan and Ukraine and something even less noble than a war continued to unfold in Gaza, and as the world prepared for an only partly precedented new, oligarchical (I think at this point that’s the least I could call it) US government. Writing this now, just a few months later, events have unfolded somewhat worse than might have been expected. Those wars still continue and despite signs to the contrary, the situation in Gaza seems if anything bleaker than before. That US administration began the year by talking about taking territory from what had been allies, supporting neo-Nazi and similar political groups across the world, celebrating high profile sex offenders and violent criminals while pretending to care about the victims of sex offenders and violent criminals, and has gone downhill from there. In the original draft of this article I predicted that this Presidential term would be an even more farcical horrorshow (not in the Clockwork Orange/Nadsat sense, although Alex and his Droogs might well enjoy this bit of the 2020s; I suppose what I mean is ‘horror show’) than the same president’s previous one, and since it already feels like the longest presidency of my lifetime I guess I was right. So, between the actual news and the way it never stops coming (hard to remember, but pre-internet ‘the news’ genuinely wasn’t so relentless or inescapable, although events presumably happened at the same rate) it’s important to find comfort somewhere. The obvious, big caveat is that one has to be in a somewhat privileged position to be able to find some comfort in the first place. There are people all over the world – including here in the UK – who can only find it, if at all, in things like prayer or philosophy; but regardless, not being so dragged down by current events that you can’t function is kind of important however privileged you are, and even those who find the whole idea of ‘self-love’ inimical have to find comfort somewhere.
But where? And anyway, what does comfort even mean? Well, everyone knows what it means, but though as a word it seems fluffy and soft (Comfort fabric softener, the American word “comforter” referring to a quilt), it actually comes from the Latin “com-fortis” meaning something like “forceful strength” – but let’s not get bogged down in etymology again.
But wherever you find it, the effect of comfort has a mysterious relationship to the things that actually offer us support or soothe our grief and mental distress. Which is not obvious; if you want to laugh, you turn to something funny, which obviously subjective but never mind. Sticking to books, because I can – for me lots of things would work, if I want to be amused, Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell, Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books and, less obviously, The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson always raise a smile or a laugh. Conversely, if you want to be scared or disgusted (in itself a strange and obscure desire, but a common one), you’d probably turn to horror, let’s say HP Lovecraft, Stephen King’s IT or, less generic but not so different, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. But as you might have guessed if you’ve read anything else on this website, I’d probably all of those things among my ‘comfort reads.’
not my comfort reads
But whatever I am reading, I’m not alone; people want ‘comfort reads’ and indeed there is a kind of comfort industry; these days. Not just these days, but over the years it’s developed from poetry anthologies and books of inspirational quotes to more twee versions of the same thing. I think of books of the Chicken Soup for the Soul kind (I don’t think I made that up; if I recall my mother owned a little book of that title, full of ‘words of wisdom’ and comforting quotes) as a 90s phenomenon, but that might be wrong. But at some point that evolved into the more widespread ‘mindfulness’ (colouring books, crochet, apps), Marketing-wise there have been phenomena like hygge (as far as I’ve seen books of the Chicken Soup type, but with more crossover into other areas, as with mindfulness) and, in Scotland at least, hygge rebranded, aggravatingly, as ‘coorie.’ In this context ‘coorie’ is a similar concept to ‘hygge’ but it’s not really how I’ve been used to hearing the word used through my life so something like ‘A Little Book of Coorie‘ just doesn’t sound right. But maybe a book of hygge doesn’t either, if you grew up with that word?
People take comfort in pretty much anything that distracts them, so often the best kind of comfort is being active; walking, running, working or eating, and I understand that; nothing keeps you in the moment or prevents brooding like focusing on what you’re doing. But, unless you’re in a warzone or something, it’s when you aren’t busy that the world seems the most oppressive, and while running may keep you occupied, which can be comforting, it isn’t ‘comfortable’ (for me) in the usual sense of the word. Personally, the things I do for comfort are most likely to be the same things I write about most often, because I like them; reading, listening to music, watching films or TV.
Comfort reading, comfort viewing, comfort listening are all familiar ideas, and at first I assumed that the core of what makes them comforting must be their familiarity. And familiarity presumably does have a role to play – I probably wouldn’t turn to a book I knew nothing about for comfort, though I might read something new by an author I already like. Familiarity, though it might be – thinking of my own comfort reads – the only essential ingredient for something to qualify as comforting, is in itself a neutral quality at best and definitely not automatically comforting. But even when things are comforting, does that mean they have anything in common with each other, other that the circular fact of their comforting quality? Okay, it’s getting very annoying writing (and reading) the word comforting now.
Many of the books that I’d call my all-time favourites don’t pass the comfort test; that is, I have to be in the mood for them. I love how diverse and stimulating books like Dawn Ades’ Writings on Art and Anti-Art and Harold Rosenberg’s The Anxious Object are, but although I can dip into them at almost any time, reading an article isn’t the same as reading a book. There are not many novels I like better than The Revenge for Love or The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis. They are funny and clever and mean-spirited in a way that I love and I’ve read them several times and will probably read them again; but I never turn to Lewis for comfort. But even though he would probably be glad not to be a ‘comfort read,’ that has nothing (as far as I can tell) to do with the content of his books. Some of my ‘comfort reads’ are obvious, and in analysing them I can come up with a list of plausible points that make them comforting, but others less so.
random selection of comfort reads
In that obvious category are books I read when I was young, but that I can still happily read as an adult. There is an element of nostalgia in that I’m sure, and nostalgia in its current form is a complicated kind of comfort. I first read The Lord of the Rings in my early teens but, as I’ve written elsewhere, I had previously had it read to me as a child, so I feel like I’ve always known it. Obviously that is comforting in itself, but there’s also the fact that it is an escapist fantasy; magical and ultimately uplifting, albeit in a bittersweet way. The same goes for my favourites of Michael Moorcock’s heroic fantasy series. I read the Corum, Hawkmoon and Elric series’ (and various other bits of the Eternal Champion cycle) in my teens and though Moorcock is almost entirely different from Tolkien, the same factors (escapist fantasy, heroic, magical etc) apply. Even the Robert Westall books I read and loved as a kid, though they (The Watch House, The Scarecrows, The Devil on the Road, The Wind Eye, the Machine Gunners, Fathom Five) are often horrific, have the comforting quality that anything you loved when you were 11 has. Not that the books stay the same; as an adult they are, surprisingly, just as creepy as I remembered, but I also notice things I didn’t notice then. Something too mild to be called misogyny, but a little uncomfortable nonetheless and, more impressively, characters that I loved and identified with now seem like horrible little brats, which I think is actually quite clever. But that sense of identification, even with a horrible little brat, has a kind of comfort in it, possibly.
The same happens with (mentioned in too many other things on this site) IT. A genuinely nasty horror novel about a shapeshifting alien that pretends to be a clown and kills and eats children doesn’t at first glance seem like it should be comforting. But if you read it when you were thirteen and identified with the kids rather than the monster, why wouldn’t it be? Having all kind of horrible adventures with your friends is quite appealing as a child and having them vicariously via a book is the next best thing, or actually a better or at least less perilous one.
But those are books I read during or before adolescence and so the comforting quality comes to them naturally, or so it seems. The same could be true of my favourite Shakespeare plays, which I first read during probably the most intensely unhappy part of my adolescence – but in a weird, counterintuitive way, that adds to the sense of nostalgia. Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books are kind of in a category of their own. When I read the first one, Adrian was 13 and I would have been 11. And then, I read the second a year or so later, but the others just randomly through the years. I’m not sure I was even aware of them when they were first published, but the ones where Adrian is an adult are just as funny but also significantly more painful. It’s a strange thing to read about the adult life of a character you “knew” when you were both unhappy children. Although she had a huge amount of acclaim and success during her life, I’m still not sure Townsend gets quite the credit she’s due for making Adrian Mole a real person. Laughing at a nerdy teenager’s difficult adolescence and his cancer treatment as a still-unhappy adult is a real imaginative and empathic achievement. Still; the comfort there could be in the familiar, not just the character but the world he inhabits. Adrian is, reading him as an adult (and as he becomes an adult) surprisingly nuanced; even though he’s an uptight and conservative and in a way a little Englander and terminally unreliable as a teenager and loses none of those traits as an adult, you somehow know that you can count on him not to be a Nazi or misogynist, no small thing in this day and age.
But if Frodo and Elric and Adrian Mole are characters who I knew from childhood or adolescence, what about A Clockwork Orange, which I first read and immediately loved in my early 20s and which, despite the (complicatedly) happy ending could hardly be called uplifting? Or The Catcher in the Rye, which again I didn’t read until my 20s and have been glad ever since that I didn’t “do” it at school as so many people did. Those books have a lot in common with Adrian Mole, in the sense that they are first-person narratives by troubled teenagers. Not that Alex is “troubled” in the Adrian/Holden Caulfield sense. But maybe it’s that sense of a ‘voice’ that’s comforting? If so, what does that say about the fact that Crash by JG Ballard or worse, American Psycho is also a comfort read for me? I read both of those in my 20s too, and immediately liked them but not in the same way as The Catcher in the Rye. When I read that book, part of me responds to it in the identifying sense; that part of me will probably always feel like Holden Caulfield, even though I didn’t do the things he did or worry about ‘phonies’ as a teenager. I loved Crash from the first time I read the opening paragraphs but although there must be some sense of identification (it immediately felt like one of ‘my’ books) and although have a lot of affection for Ballard as he comes across in interviews, I don’t find myself reflected in the text, thankfully. Same (even more thankfully) with American Psycho – Patrick Bateman is an engaging, very annoying narrator (more Holden than Alex, interestingly) and I find that as with Alex in A Clockwork Orange his voice feels oddly effortless for me to read. Patrick isn’t as nice(!) or as funny or clever as Alex, but still, there’s something about his neurotic observations and hilariously tedious lists that’s – I don’t know, not soothing to read, exactly, but easy to read. Or something. Hmm.
But if Alex, Adrian, Holden and Patrick feel real, what about actual real people? I didn’t read Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice until I was in my early 30s, but it quickly became a book that I can pick up and enjoy it at any time. And yet, though there is a kind of overall narrative and even a sort of happy ending, that isn’t really the main appeal; and in this case it isn’t familiarity either. It’s episodic and easy to dip into (Jon Ronson’s books have that too and so do George Orwell’s Essays and Journalism and Philip Larkin’s Selected Letters, which is another comfort read from my 20s) The culture of Japan that Adelstein documents as a young reporter has an alien kind of melancholy that is somehow hugely appealing even when it’s tragic. Another true (or at least fact-based) comfort read, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I only read in my 40s after meaning to read it ever since high school, has no business whatsoever being comforting. So why is it? I’m not getting any closer to an answer.
Predictability presumably has a role to play; as mentioned above, I wouldn’t read a book for the first time as ‘a comfort read’ and even though I said I might read a familiar author that way, it suddenly occurs to me that that is only half true. I would read Stephen King for comfort, but I can think of at least two of his books where the comfort has been undone because the story went off in a direction that I didn’t want it to. That should be a positive thing; predictability, even in genre fiction which is by definition generic to some extent, is the enemy of readability and the last thing you want is to lose interest in a thriller. I’ve never been able to enjoy whodunnit type thrillers for some reason; my mother loved them and they – Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Sue Grafton, even Dick Francis, were her comfort reads. Maybe they are too close to puzzles for my taste? Not sure.
So to summarise; well-loved stories? Sometimes comforting. Identifiable-with characters? Sometimes comforting. Authorial voices? This may be the only unifying factor in all the books I’ve listed and yet it still seems a nebulous kind of trait and Robert Westall has little in common with Sue Townsend or Bret Easton Ellis, or (etc, etc). So instead of an actual conclusion, I’ll end with a funny, sad and comforting quote from a very silly, funny but in some ways comforting book; Harry Harrison’s 1965 satirical farce Bill, the Galactic Hero. The book is in lots of ways horrific; Bill, an innocent farm boy, finds himself swept up into the space corps and a series of ridiculous and perilous adventures. The ending of the book is both funny and very bitter, but rewinding to the end of part one, Bill has lost his left arm in combat but had a new one – but a right arm, which belonged to his best friend, grafted on:
He wished he could talk to some of his old buddies, then remembered that they were all dead and his spirits dropped further. He tried to cheer himself up but could think of nothing to be cheery about until he discovered that he could shake hands with himself. This made him feel a little better. He lay back on the pillows and shook hands with himself until he fell asleep.
Harry Harrison, Bill the Galactic Hero, p.62 (Victor Gollancz, 1965)
Although Mr Musk’s* statement about Hitler, Stalin and Mao is (surely not unexpectedly) ignorant and abhorrent, he is making a serious point that’s worth remembering, even if his reasons for doing so come from a paranoid, (wouldn’t normally go straight for the WW2 analogy but he already did, so why not?) bunker-mentality sense of self-preservation.
Hitler was the main architect of the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities from murder to mental/physical torture to the indoctrination of children in a misanthropic ideology, and so he therefore bears a large part of the moral responsibility for it. BUT, he genuinely wasn’t standing there in the streets of Warsaw or the hills of Ukraine, swinging small children by the legs and smashing them to death against walls or leading groups of half-starved prisoners into ravines and machine-gunning them, or even holding a gun to the heads of those who did to make sure they did it.
*nice innit? Sounds kind of like a fox from an old children’s book
Stalin’s policies led, both directly and indirectly to the death of millions, but he wasn’t personally there in the salt mines working people to death, or stabbing them in the head with ice-picks or torturing and shooting them because their vision of communism differed from his, or simply because they refused to agree with him.
Mao Zedong instigated vast, dehumanising programs that decimated the people of his country through famine and starvation and led campaigns that ruthlessly wiped out political opponents – but he did it with words or with a pen, not with bullets or by actually snatching food from people’s mouths.
In all of those cases, those atrocities happened for two reasons; most importantly, because the instigators wanted it; they would not have happened without those three individuals. But also because others, most of whose names are now unknown to us without a lot of tedious and depressing research, were willing to make it happen. The people who murdered and tortured did those things, some no doubt more enthusiastically than others, because they were paid to do so. Now, there are people ending international aid to starving children, or impeding Ukraine’s fight against the invading forces of Russia, or firing veterans or ‘just’ setting up armed cordons around car dealerships and arresting people that they or their superiors are pretending for ideological reasons to think are dangerous aliens – and whatever the level of enthusiasm, they are essentially doing those things because they are being paid to.
Some of these people (it doesn’t matter which era or regime you apply this to, as bodycam and mobile phone footage testifies) perform additional cruelties which they aren’t specifically being paid for, and that their leaders may never even know about, just because they can and because it gratifies them in some way, while others are simply following the orders they are given.
But ‘just following orders’ – complicity, in a word – wasn’t considered a reasonable defence in the war trials of 1945 and it still isn’t one now. And the reptilian act of formulating and issuing dehumanising orders, even (or perhaps especially?) without personally committing any atrocities oneself isn’t any kind of defence at all. It was and should be part of any prosecution’s case for maximum culpability. Leaders require followers and followers need leaders, but you don’t have to be either.
Whether or not you agree with Sigmund Freud that “the dream proves to be the first of a series of abnormal psychic formations” or that “one who cannot explain the origin of the dream pictures will strive in vain to understand [the] phobias, the obsessive and delusional ideas and likewise their therapeutic importance,” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1913 translated by A.A. Brill) dreams are a regular, if not daily/nightly part of human life regardless of culture, language, age etc, and so not without significance. I could go on about dreams like I did about honey in a previous post but I won’t – they are too pervasive popular culture – just everywhere in culture, in books, and plays and art and films and songs (Dreams they complicate/complement my life, as Michael Stipe wrote.) That’s enough of that.
But what about daydreams? If dreams arrive uninvited from the unconscious or subconscious mind, then surely the things we think about, or dwell on, deliberately are even more important. “Dwell on” is an interesting phrase – to dwell is “to live in a place or in a particular way” BUT ‘dwell’ has a fascinating history that makes it seem like exactly the right word in this situation – from the Old English dwellan “to lead into error, deceive, mislead,” related to dwelian “to be led into error, go wrong in belief or judgment” etc, etc, according to etymonline.com : I’ll put the whole of this in a footnote* because I think it’s fascinating, but the key point is that at some time in the medieval period it’s largely negative connotations, to “delay” become modified to mean “to stay.” But I like to think the old meaning of the word lingers in the subtext like dreams in the subconscious.
But I could say something similar about my own use of the word “deliberately” above (“Things we dwell on deliberately”) and even more so the phrase I nearly used instead, which was “on purpose” – but then this would become a ridiculously long and convoluted piece of writing, so that’s enough etymology for now.
The human mind is a powerful thing. Even for those of us who don’t believe in telekinesis or remote viewing or ‘psychic powers’ in the explicitly paranormal sense. After all, your mind controls everything you think and nearly everything you do to the point where separating the mind from the body, as western culture tends to do, becomes almost untenable. Even though the euphemism “unresponsive wakefulness syndrome” has gained some traction in recent years, that’s because the dysphemism (had to look that word up) “persistent vegetative state” is something we fear and therefore that loss of self, or of humanity offends us. It’s preferable for most of us, as fiction frequently demonstrates, to believe that even in that state, dreams of some kind continue in the mind; because as human beings we are fully our mind in a way that we are only occasionally fully our body. One of the fears connected to the loss of self is that we lose the ability to choose what to think about, which is intriguing because that takes us again into the (might as well use the pompous word) realm of dreams.
The Danish actress Asta Nielsen as Hamlet in 1921
My favourite Shakespeare quote is the last line from this scene in Hamlet (Act 2 Scene 2)
Hamlet: Denmark’s a prison.
Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.
Hamlet: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ th’ worst.
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet: Why then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” seems to deny any possibility of objective morality, but its logic is undeniable. After all, you or I may think that [insert one of thousands of examples from current politics and world events] is ‘wrong’, but if [individual in position of power] doesn’t think so, and does the wrong thing, even if all of the worst possible outcomes stem from it, the most you can say is that you, and people who agree with you, think it was wrong. Hitler almost certainly believed, as he went to the grave, that he was a martyr who had failed in his grand plan only because of the betrayal and duplicity of others. I think that’s wrong, you hopefully think that’s wrong, even “history” thinks that’s wrong, but none of that matters to Hitler in his bunker in 1945, any more than Rosencrantz & Guildenstern finding Denmark to be a nice place if only their old friend Hamlet could regain his usual good humour makes any difference to Hamlet.
Anyway, daydreams or reveries (a nice word that feels a bit pretentious to say); its dictionary definitions are mostly very positive – a series of pleasant thoughts about something you would prefer to be doing or something you would like to achieve in the future. A state of abstracted musing. A loose or irregular train of thought occurring in musing or mediation; deep musing – and there’s a school of thought that has been around for a long time but seems even more prevalent today, which values daydreams as, not just idle thoughts, but as affirmations. Anyone who has tried to change their life through hypnosis or various kinds of therapy will find that daydreaming and visualising are supposed to be important aspects of your journey to a better you. In a way all of these self-help gurus, lifestyle coaches and therapists are saying the same thing; as Oscar Hammerstein put it, “You got to have a dream, If you don’t have a dream, How you gonna have a dream come true?” But is making your dreams, even your daydreams, come true necessarily a good thing?
patriotic vapour trails spotted this winter
I seem to remember once reading that if you can focus all of your attention on something for 15 seconds you’ll remember it forever (not sure about the duration; if you Google stuff like this you find there are millions of people offering strategies to improve your memory, which isn’t quite what I was looking for). Whether or not that’s true, every time I see a vapour trail in an otherwise blue sky, I have the same thought/image – actually two thoughts, but “first you look so strong/then you fade away” came later and failed to replace the earlier thought, which must date from the age of 9 or 10 or so. I realise that people telling you their dreams is boring (or so people say, I never find it to be so), but you don’t have to keep reading. I can see the fluffy, white trail against the hot pale blue sky (it’s summer, the sun is incandescent and there are no clouds) and as my eye follows it from its fraying, fading tail to its source, I can see the nose cone of the plane glinting in the sun, black or red and metallic. It looks slow, leisurely even, but the object is travelling at hundreds of miles an hour. I know there’s no pilot inside that warm, clean shell (I can imagine feeling its heat, like putting your hand on the bonnet or roof of a car parked in direct sunshine; only there are rivets studding the surface of this machine). I’m shading my eyes with my hand, watching its somehow benign-looking progress, but I know that it’s on its way to the nearby airforce base and that others are simultaneously flying towards other bases and major cities and soon, everything I can see and feel will be vapourised and cease to exist. I had this daydream many times as a child, I have no idea how long it lasted but I can remember the clarity and metallic taste of it incredibly clearly. Did I want it to happen? Definitely not. Was I scared? No, although I remember an almost physical sense of shaking it off afterwards. Did I think it would happen? It’s hard to remember, maybe – but I wouldn’t have been alone in that if so. But anyway, the interesting point to me is that this wasn’t a dream that required sleep or the surrender of the conscious mind to the unconscious – I was presumably doing it “on purpose”, although what that purpose was I have no idea; nothing very nice anyway.
Childhood hero: Charles M Schulz’s Charlie Brown
Probably most of us carry around a few daydreams with us, most I’m sure far more pleasant than that one. I can remember a few from my adolescence that were almost tangible then and still feel that way now (I would swear that I can remember what a particular person’s cheek felt like against my fingertips though I definitely didn’t ever touch it. As my childhood role model, Charlie Brown would say, “Augh!” Charles M. Schulz clearly knew about these things and still felt them vividly as an adult (as, more problematically, did Egon Schiele, subject of my previous article; but let’s not go into that). Most of the daydreams we keep with us into adulthood (or create in adulthood) are probably nicer baggage to carry around than the vapour trail one, unless you’re one of those people who fantasises about smashing people’s heads in with an iron bar (who has such a thing as an iron bar? Why iron? Wouldn’t brass do the job just as well and lead even better?) beyond the teenage years when violent daydreams are almost inevitable, but hopefully fleeting.
But thinking about your daydreams is odd, they are, like your thoughts and dreams, yours and nobody else’s, but where they come from in their detail seems almost as obscure as dream-dreams. Perhaps Freud would know. I have a couple of daydreams that have been lurking around for decades, but while I don’t believe in telekinesis or even the current obsession with affirmations and ‘manifesting,’ apparently I must be a bit superstitious; because if I wrote them down they might not come true innit?
A few years ago a friend sent me a photograph of the ten-year-old us in our Primary School football team. I was able, without too much thought, to put names to all eleven of the boys, but the biggest surprise was that my initial reaction, for maybe a second but more like two seconds, was not to recognise myself. In my defence, I don’t have any other pictures of me at that age, and even more unusually, in that picture I’m genuinely smiling. Usually I froze when a camera was pointed at me (and still do, if it takes too long), but I must have felt safer than usual in a group shot, because it is a real smile and not the standard grimace that normally happened when I was asked to smile for photographs. I could possibly also be forgiven for my confusion because in contrast with my present self, ten year old me had no eyebrows, a hot-pink-to-puce complexion and unmanageably thick, wavy, fair hair; but even so, that was the face I looked at in the mirror every day for years and, more to the point, that gangly child with comically giant hands actually is me; but what would I know?
My favourite of David Hockney’s self portraits – Self Portrait with Blue Guitar (1977)
In a recent documentary, the artist David Hockney made a remark (paraphrased because I don’t have it to refer to) that resonated with me; your face isn’t for you, it’s for other people. And, as you’d expect of someone who has spent a significant part of his long career scrutinizing people and painting portraits of them, he has a point. Everyone around you has a more accurate idea of what you look like than you do. Even when you see someone ‘in real life’ who you are used to seeing in photographs or films, there’s a moment of mental recalibration; even if they look like their image, the human being before you in three dimensions is a whole different scale from the thing you are used to seeing. I remember reading in some kids’ novel that the young footballer me liked (I’m guessing Willard Price but can’t swear to it) that when being shown photographs of themselves, the indigenous people of (I think) New Guinea, not only weren’t impressed, but didn’t recognise them as anything in particular. Like Hockney, they had a point; if the Victorian people who invented photography hadn’t grown up with a tradition of ‘realistic,’ representational art would they have seen any relationship between themselves as living, breathing, colourful, space-filling three-dimensional organisms and the monochromatic marks on little flat pieces of paper? The response of the fictional New Guinea tribespeople is actually more logical than the response (surprise, wonder, awe) that’s expected of them in the novel.
Hockney went on further to say that portrait painting (if the sitter is present with the artist) gives a better idea of a person than photography does. At first this is a harder argument to buy into in a way, but it has its own logic too. A photograph, as he pointed out, is a two-dimensional record of one second in time, whereas the portrait painter creates their also two-dimensional image from spending time in the company of the sitter and focusing on them, a different, deeper kind of focus, since it engages the brain as well as the senses, than the technical one that happens with a lens, light and film or digital imaging software. A camera doesn’t care what you are like, it just sees how you look, from that angle, for that second. Maybe my big 10-year-old smile really is representative of how I was, but from memory it doesn’t represent that period for me at all.
Egon Schiele in his studio c.1915 (left) vs his 1913 self-portrait (right)
But I might never have written this had I not been reading Frank Whitford’s excellent monograph on the Austrian expressionist painter Egon Schiele (Thames & Hudson, 1981). Schiele is famous for (among other things) his twisted, emaciated and fanatically awkward self-portraits. The man he depicts is scrawny, elongated, intense, sometimes almost feline and utterly modern. Schiele in photographs, on the other hand, is quite a different presence. He sometimes has the expected haunted look and the familiar shock of hair, and he poses almost as awkwardly, but otherwise he looks surprisingly dapper, civilised, diminutive, square faced and elfin. But if we think – and it seems logical that we do – that the photographs show us the ‘real’ Schiele, then the descriptions of those who knew him suggest otherwise. “a slim young man of more than average height… Pale but not sickly, thin in the face, large dark eyes and full longish dark brown hair which stood out in all directions. His manner was a little shy, a little timid and a little self-confident. He did not say much, but when spoken to his face always lit up with the glimmer of a quiet smile.” (Heinrich Benesch, quoted in Whitford, p.66) This description doesn’t exactly clash with the Schiele of the photographs (though he never appears especially tall), but it’s somehow far easier to identify with the dark-eyed, paradoxically shy and confident Schiele of the self portraits. In his own writings, Schiele seems as tortured and intense as in his paintings, but in photographs he appears confident, knowing and slightly arch. His face, as Hockney says, may not have been for him, but he seems to have captured it in his art in ways that his friends and acquaintances recognised, and which the camera apparently didn’t.
Schiele in 1914 by Josef Anton Trčka (left) vs his 1911 self portrait (right)
Which, what, proves Hockney both right (portraiture is superior to photography) and wrong (Schiele knew his own face)? And anyway, what does that have to do with the 10-year old me? Nothing really, except that the camera, objective and disinterested, captured an aspect of me in that second which may or may not have been “true.” Objectivity and disinterestedness are positive qualities for evaluating facts, but when it comes to human beings, facts and truth have a complicated relationship. Photography, through its “realness,” has issues capturing these complexities, unless the photographer is aware of them and – Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin spring to mind – has the ability to imbue their work with more than the obvious surface information that is the camera’s speciality. But manually-created art, with its human heart and brain directing, naturally takes the relationship between truth and facts in its stride.
One final example that proves nothing really, except to my satisfaction. Around the year 1635, the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez was tasked with painting portraits of the assorted fools, jesters dwarfs and buffoons whose lives were spent entertaining the Spanish court. Most of these people suffered from mental or physical disabilities (or both) and were prized (I think a more accurate word than ‘valued’ in this context) for their difference from ‘normal’ people; in the same way as carnival “freaks” into the early 20th century in fact. Although these people were comparatively privileged, compared to what their lives would have been like had they not been adopted by the Royal court, their position in the household was more akin to pets than friends or even servants. Juan de Calabazas (“John of Gourds; a gourd was a traditional jester’s attribute) suffered from unknown mental illnesses and physical tics. In a time and place where formality and manners were rigidly maintained, especially around the monarch – where a misstep in etiquette could have serious or even fatal consequences, buffoons like Juan entertained the court with unfettered, sometimes nonsensical or outrageous speech, impulsive laughter and strange, free behaviour. Whereas in normal society these people would be lucky even to survive, in the Court their behaviour was celebrated and encouraged. Velázquez is rightly famous for the empathy and humanity with which he painted portraits of these marginalised figures, but although, as Wikipedia (why not?) puts it; “Velázquez painted [Juan] in a relatively calm state, further showing Velazquez’s equal show of dignity to all, whether king or jester” that seems an unusual response to the portrait below, It’s not untrue, but for me at least, Velázquez’s process of humanisation is painful too. The knowledge that this man lived his life as a plaything of the rich and powerful, alive only because they found him funny is troubling enough. But that pathos seems to be embodied in the picture and you know, or it feels like you know, that Velázquez didn’t find him funny, or at least not only funny. It’s something like watching David Lynch’s The Elephant Man compared to looking at the Victorian photographs of the real Joseph Merrick. Seeing the photographs is troubling, seeing Lynch’s cinematic portrait is too, but it’s deeply moving too.
Juan de Calabazas (c.1635-9) by Diego Velázquez
All of which may just be a way of saying that a camera is a machine and does what it does – recording the exterior of what it’s pointed at – perfectly, while a human being does, and feels, many things simultaneously, probably not perfectly. Well I’m sure we all knew that anyway. I eventually got eyebrows, by the way.
Way back in April this year Henrik Palm released an album called Nerd Icon (via Svart Records). It’s very good – 80s-inflected melodic hard rock is as good a description as any, I guess, but it has a very individual personality and none of the pomposity or poser quality of that kind of music (no offence to actual 80s rock, which I love). In fact it’s one of my albums of the year (see short list below somewhere). But thinking about ‘albums of the year’ (yes, I probably whinge about this annually) especially in the context of Henrik Palm’s work makes me think of what a meaningless accolade it is. Not because there isn’t lots of good music produced every year, but just because people who love music don’t generally accumulate favourite albums in a real time, chronological way. The point of recorded music is that it has been recorded and can be therefore enjoyed outside of the time and place that it was made.
To labour the point, if music only moved forwards, with this year’s top 50 (or whatever) albums superseding last year’s and so on, ‘classic albums’ wouldn’t exist and once-obscure artists would remain obscure and people like Nick Drake (obvious example I know) would be only loved by the shockingly tiny handful of living people who bought his work at the time. But even before the internet that wasn’t the case and it still isn’t, so end of year lists end up being as peculiar a time capsule as the top 40 from years ago is. Yes, they are ranked by quality rather than popularity, but as looking back at these things demonstrates, they are no more reliable for that.
Not an album of this year, but an unexpected favourite
But the reason Henrik Palm illustrates this point for me is that in 2020 he released Poverty Metal, I heard it at the time and quite liked it but I don’t think I wrote about it anywhere, though it got a surprised mention in 2022 – and to my continued surprise I still play it fairly often. It’s an album as unassuming and quirky (I mean that is the right word but bleh) as its title – melodic, sometimes kind of 70s-ish, sometimes not, rarely very metal, often quite delicate and always thoughtful. It’s peculiar, but part of what makes it peculiar is how conventional it is – but at the same time, how unusual it is by the standards of those conventions. I guess it has become one of my favourite albums, which I don’t think anything on my actual 2020 ‘albums of the year’ lists did. And after the dust has settled on 2024, it may be that if any album from this year enters my personal pantheon, it could be one that hasn’t really registered with me yet or that I haven’t even heard.
Now that I’ve undermined it in advance, here’s my ‘albums of the year’ feature.
My favourite albums of this year are two which I (obviously) think are great, but for varying reasons I don’t know if they will stick around my personal playlist like Poverty Metal has – but they may.
The first is In Concert by Diamanda Galás (Intravenal Sound Operations). Live albums are interesting in that many people (including myself) can be slightly dismissive of them (“_____ has a new album coming out! Oh, it’s just a live album“), a strange reaction, because if you’re lucky enough to see your favourite artists live you never think “oh, it was just a live performance.” In the context of home listening, none of the ephemeral magic of a live show – the stuff that’s really about you – is present, but theoretically the most important part is. In comparison with Galás’ recent, brilliantly gruelling work (Broken Gargoyles was my album of the year in 2022) the album is simple, or at least unadorned; just her extraordinary voice and uniquely expressive piano. But that’s quite a ‘just’ – and she plays a set of songs that are urgent, deeply moving, haunting, wise, shockingly relevant and occasionally wickedly funny. What more do you want? It’s about as far removed from a stadium band delivering polished versions of their greatest hits as you can get and though it would no doubt be a fantastic souvenir and reminder if you were lucky enough to see the performance, it’s entirely transporting just as a record. Will it join the Masque of the Red Death trilogy, The Litanies of Satan, The Sporting Life and Broken Gargoyles as one of my favourite Diamanda Galás albums? Who knows? Some of her work takes time to really get to know in a way that In Concert doesn’t, and I feel like I’m still ‘working on’ (not the right phrase) some of her older work – what that means for this album I don’t know, but I do know that nothing this year has cut deeper.
Joint album of the year – The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World
My second album of the year is Songs of a Lost World by The Cure (Fiction), which I reviewed here, which is just as visceral for me, but for completely different reasons. It is, as an amazing amount of people seem to agree, a superb album, moving and memorable and all of that; but I have been a fan of The Cure since I was seventeen and there hasn’t been any point where I stopped listening to them completely. That doesn’t necessarily mean I was predisposed to like it – their last couple of records didn’t do much for me, though they have their moments – but it is relevant to my personal response to it. Even though by any objective methods of analysis (there aren’t any) Songs of a Lost World is probably as good as anything the band has done, will it join Seventeen Seconds, Disintegration, Japanese Whispers and Pornography as one of my all-time favourite Cure albums? Or even Faith, The Top, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, the Head on the Door and Boys Don’t Cry as my second-tier, almost-favourite Cure albums? Only time will tell, but in that time I will no longer be the me that was most receptive to their music and the band will have to compete with far more music (old, new, whatever) than they ever did when I obsessively listened to them. Then I had no way of getting their work except by buying it or making tapes from friends who owned it. I definitely think I love music just as much as I ever did, but I don’t obsessively listen to anything the way I did in my teens and early 20s. The older Cure records, even the ones I liked relatively less, like Wish and Kiss Me… are imprinted on my brain in a way that just doesn’t get a chance to happen now. But in a way I feel like Songs of a Lost World addresses and encapsulates all of those feelings, which is one of the reasons it’s so good.
Not sure if it’s coincidental or significant that both of my favourite albums of the year are by artists I’ve been listening to for decades, but it’s interesting either way. So anyway, a wee list of honourable mentions and we’re done with this for another year
Henrik Palm – Nerd Icon (Svart Records) – sort of 80s-ish, sort of metal-ish, 100% individual
Myriam Gendron – Mayday (Feeding Tube) – I loved Not So Deep as a Well ten years ago (mentioned in passing here) and love this even more
Ihsahn – Ihsahn (Candlelight) – wrote about it here – for me it doesn’t top my favourite Das Seelenbrechen, but it’s as good as any of his others
One of my top 3 or 4 albums of all time, John Cale’s Paris 1919 was reissued this year, his latest POPtical Illusion was good too
Mick Harvey – Five Ways to Say Goodbye (Mute) – lovely autumnal album by ex-Bad Seed and musical genius, more here
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Wild God (PIAS recordings) – for me a good rather than amazing Nick Cave album, but he’s better than most people so still easily made the list, though I’m not sure I like it more than his old colleague’s work
Aara – Eiger(Debemur Morti Productions) – Superior Swiss black metal, conceptual without being pompous and full of great tunes and atmosphere
Claire Rousay – Sentiment (Thrill Jockey) – bracingly sparse and desolate but lovely too
Alcest – Chants de L’Aurore (Nuclear Blast) – seems so long ago that I almost forgot about it, but this was (I thought) the best Alcest album for years, beautiful, wistful and generally lovely. I talked to Neige about it at the time, I should post that interview here at some point!
I loved Nechochwen’s 
Ghost World have made some of my favourite albums; I was immediately smitten with their 2017 debut album, which was my 
Hmm. I gave this a go because, despite the fact that industrial metal is one of my least favourite genres of music in the world, Swiss black metal has a special place in my heart and LADLO is a very dependable label. And..? Well, not exactly my cup of tea, but it’s good, there’s a nice chaotic, noisy atmosphere and it reminded me at times of Abigor (who I do like) and Blacklodge (who I occasionally like). The atmospheres and the choral bits are really cool and the noisy stuff with sirens etc is impressively alarming, though not nice if you have a headache.
I 
The current case of Luigi Mangione is far stranger. It’s the only time I can recall that the supporters (in this case I think ‘fans’ would be just as correct a word) of someone accused of murder want the suspect to be guilty rather than innocent. Whether they would still feel that way if he looked different or had a history of violent crime or had a different kind of political agenda is endlessly debatable, but irrelevant. It looks as if the State will be seeking the death penalty for him and for all the reasons listed above I think that’s wrong. But assuming that he’s guilty, which obviously one shouldn’t do (and if he isn’t, Jesus Christ, good luck getting a fair trial!) Mangione himself and some of his fans, should really be okay with it. If he is guilty, he hasn’t done anything to help a single person to get access to healthcare or improve the healthcare system or even effectively protested against it in a way that people with political power can positively react to. UnitedHealthcare still has a CEO, still has dubious political connections and still treats people very badly. That doesn’t mean that it’s an unassailable monolith that can never be changed, but clearly removing one figurehead isn’t how it can be done.
Henrik Palm – Nerd Icon (Svart Records) – sort of 80s-ish, sort of metal-ish, 100% individual
Myriam Gendron – Mayday (Feeding Tube) – I loved Not So Deep as a Well ten years ago (mentioned in passing 
Ihsahn – Ihsahn (Candlelight) – wrote about it 
One of my top 3 or 4 albums of all time, John Cale’s Paris 1919 was reissued this year, his latest POPtical Illusion was good too
Mick Harvey – Five Ways to Say Goodbye (Mute) – lovely autumnal album by ex-Bad Seed and musical genius, more 
Aara – 
Claire Rousay – 
Alcest – Chants de L’Aurore (Nuclear Blast) – seems so long ago that I almost forgot about it, but this was (I thought) the best Alcest album for years, beautiful, wistful and generally lovely. I talked to Neige about it at the time, I should post that interview here at some point!