Three

-- Do you think that we'd be as interested in these paintings if they weren't by Bob Dylan?

-- No, but they are by Bob Dylan, so let's move on.

News night Review, BBC2 13th June.

Glamourpuss is a 28 page comic book -- 19 pages of comics, 7 pages of text + covers.

It is packaged as a parody of a woman's fashion/lifestyle magazine. It is, it goes without saying, spectacularly well-drawn. In places, it is very funny. Almost everyone who has seen my copy has at least smiled at the strap-line: "The high fashion comic book that's SO six months ago"

Six pages of the comic depict the internal monologue of an airheaded fashion model named "Glamourpuss." Reading about Chinese culture, she exclaims: "These people make foot binding seem like a...a...bad thing. Don't they realise that an L.B.D by Vera Wang just looks wrong with size four booties?" Exegetes may take the view that, since it depicts a woman who is a self-obsessed idiot, "the comic" "says" that "women" are self-obsessed idiots. I found it quite amusing.

Many people have spotted that as Cerebus progressed, it became less and less about Cerebus and more and more about Dave Sim. It has also been noted that as the comic got more and more Simcentric, the art got better and better. Glamourpuss. is not about Glamourpuss. Nor is it, except incidentally, about fashion. It is about Dave Sim, and about drawing. It is about Dave Sim drawing. It is about Dave Sim drawing Glamourpuss.

Dave says that the title of the issue -- "The Top Secret Origin of Glamourpuss."("WHO she is! HOW she came to be! WHERE she gets all those great clothes") is a slightly cynical in-joke: "In comic book stores, if you have a No.1 and a "origin of..." story, no matter how pointless, it's going to boost your sales." But it is actually a pretty good description of the comic. The comic is about how Dave came up with the idea for the comic; and about the techniques he used to produce it.

Pages 1 - 5 are a series of pictures of a pretty girl in various outfits, overlaid with captions in which Dave speaks in his own voice. (The voice is that of Lucid-Dave, not Mad-Dave: the voice of the funny editorials, not that of the ranting essays.) Lucid-Dave says that when people asked him what he was going to work on after Cerebus, he always replied "photo-realistic pictures of cute teenage girls". This was, in fact, what he was drawing, but he had no way of coming up with a story to go with the pictures. (Exegetes may wish to spend some time wondering whether the comic "says" that it's ok for middle aged men to look at pictures of teenagers, and whether "cute" is a sexist word to apply to members of the opposite gender. The models in Glamourpuss. are all well over the age of consent.)

On pages 6-9 there are more fashion pictures, and copies of comic-strips by Alex Raymond, who he believes to be the past-master of the photo-realistic style. He comments in great detail about the techniques that Raymond used. I must admit that I had rather assumed that "photo realistic" drawing wasn't real art: it's simply a matter of tracing a photograph, isn't it? Sim explains that it's actually all about translation -- finding the exact kind of brush stroke that will represent a texture in pen-and-ink. And indeed, every one of the "traced" images in the book are instantly identifiable as "Dave Sim" pictures.

Sim uses Raymond's Rip Kirby as an example: a comic which I confess I've never seen. I enjoyed Raymond's Flash Gordon for the strange architecture and the inventive story-telling: although I can see that the realistic human figures are very pretty indeed, particularly in the Ice Kingdom segment. Sim uses pages from fashion magazines to experiment with photo-realistic work simply because they provide a ready source of reference material – and also, presumably, because the clothes themselves present an interesting artistic challenge.

On pages 10 - 15, he "demonstrates" that it isn't possible to turn this material into a comic because -- obviously -- a series of pictures of different models in different poses don't make up a narrative sequence. So he presents a series of montages of Glamourpuss. and her meandering thoughts about life and clothes – the last of which is interrupted by Lucid-Dave saying "This is actually pretty good! This could work!"

The remainder of the comic consists of more close readings of Rip Kirby, concentrating in particular on Alex Raymond's use of heavy black shading, breaking off on page 19 with a "Sorry, I seem to have run out of pages this time around."

The package is rounded out with text pages which are parodies (parodies) of women's magazine features, such as Glamourpuss's "five signs that you've found Mr. Right" which are, of course, five signs that the man you are dating is completely unsuitable for you. ("He stands you up and doesn't call to apologize....Horrified? Relax. He's just playing head games with you because he's finally realized how deeply and passionately and inextricably in love with you he is...") Exegetes may have a problem with this section, since it seems to "say" that men are selfish louses, but that women aren't clever enough to spot this -- which suggests a sexual politics which is slightly (slightly) more complicated than the single word "misogyny" might suggest.

I dunno. If you asked me "what does Dave Sim do well" I'd come up with a list along the lines of:

a: caricature

b: body language

c: voice -- using balloons and lettering to tell you what his characters sound like

d: Panel composition

e: Dialogue -- even the barking mad Torah commentaries were intermittently very funny

f: Farce

g: Big, overarching plots

h: Complicated political machinations

Glamourpuss. seems explicitly created to leave all of this out.

Not that one can't still see Dave's skill. Page 14 is a single image of Glamourpuss. against a white background. The captions are printed directly on the background, but the whole page is enclosed by a heavy black box. It is almost ostentatiously "not a comic." This is in contrast to page 15, which is a montage of three images against a realistic background. A small picture of Glamourpuss. is juxtaposed with a large picture of Gandhi (because she is thinking about him).This time, the page itself has no border, but Glamoupuss's thoughts are printed in boxes like conventional comic-book captions. I think that this draws us into a more sequential, less novel-like way of reading. At the bottom of the page, there is a small, inset frame containing a caricature of Dave Sim himself. The inset frame is black, were the rest of the page is on a white background; which makes the point that two different kinds of narrative, the fictional and the autobiographical, are being placed alongside each other. (We have Dave, who is creating Glamourpuss, Glamourpuss herself, and Gandhi, who Glamourpuss. is thinking about, all represented on one page, but in slightly different ways.) Sim's thoughts are in slanted text boxes to represent their "madness" and intrusiveness. The small "GP" insignia at the bottom right of the page indicates that this section of the story is "over", and we are returning to something which will at least look like a conventional comic. This represents an effortless, fluency in the sheer language of comic-books; a creator who is entirely at ease with the form; unselfconscious innovation.

Some critics objected to Cerebus on the grounds that a long work which includes both passages of comic strip and passages of prose is not kosher. I don't know whether Glamourpuss will similarly be accused of mixing milk with meat. The sections where Glamourpuss is thinking out loud are quite wordy and say "She thought" and "She said" instead of using speech bubbles and think bubbles. But the text looks like standard comic-book lettering. Perhaps we only feel that "prose" has intruded into our funny book if it is printed in Times Roman?

Glamourpuss reminds me of nothing so much as one of Harvey Pekar's less inspired days: when he spends three pages telling you that he got up, went to the toilet, bought some eggs, and couldn't think of anything to write a comic about. Of course, the whole point of American Splendour is that it's trying to transmute ordinary domestic life into art. I don't know whether the latest meanderings from Planet Dave are going to seem as interesting in the long term.

Two

Rich Puchalasky wrote:

"Some day someone will be able to explain to me how a long-running parody strip, full of tired misogynist cliches from day one, drawn in cramped little panels, makes someone an enfant terrible whose crazy missives have to be head-banged over."

Dear Rich:

I take it that, in your universe, "long-running-parody-strip-drawn-in-cramped-panels" translates as "not especially good comic-book", so your question comes out "Since Cerebus was not an especially good comic book; your should not pay attention to Dave Sim's letters."

Presumably, in your universe, the converse holds true: "If Cerebus were an especially good comic book, then perhaps you should pay attention to Dave Sim's letters." Since I do regard Cerebus as an especially good comic, it should be clear why I pay attention to Sim's letters, at any rate when someone takes the trouble to point one out to me.

You state that "Cerebus is a long running parody strip." I take it that you do not mean "If Cerebus had only run for a short time, Sim's letters would be worth paying attention to." You must be saying "Cerebus is a parody strip whose only virtue is that it ran for a long time."

This contains two assumptions:

1: Cerebus is a parody strip.

2: A parody can't have a great deal of virtue.

Point 2 can be easily disposed of. Wasn't Hamlet a parody of the Revenger's Tragedy? Isn't Northanger Abbey a parody of a the Mystery of Odolpho? Weren't Tom Jones, Don Quixote and Orlando Furioso originally parodies of works which only scholars could now tell you names of? But we don't really need to bother with this, because Point 1 is manifestly absurd.

The first issues of Cerebus the Aadvark is modelled very closely on Barry Smith's art style. If this amounts to parody, then we would have to say that the whole of the American comic book industry since 1960 has been a parody of Jack Kirby (and therefore that there are no significant comics at all.) Of course, Cerebus contains elements of parody: very funny and clever parody, the kind of parody that other people steal and turn into reasonably successful comic books and cartoon series of their own. The Cockroach is a very funny and clever parody of the 1980s incarnation of Therbatman. The Tick, not so much.

I have in front of me a copy of Swords of Cerebus vol 6, which includes the last 3 issues of the "early, funny" issues of Cerebus the Aardvark. In issue 22, Cerebus, injured in the foot ("The Earth Pig mutters grimly about civilians who wear chain mail under their clothes") takes refuge in a deserted house. It turns out that this is a girls' boarding school, run by the mysterious Madame Dupont who agrees to take care of him until he has recovered. Cerebus expects to protect the girls against militia who are active in the area, but in fact, the girls are more than able to defend themselves. The title of the piece is "The Beguiling", acknowledging the debt to Clint Eastwood 's move The Beguiled, in which a Civil War soldier similarly takes refuge in a girls' school.

Certain scenes in the comic gain an added significance if you are familiar with the filum: on page 3 Dupont makes a veiled threat, saying that she will not charge Cerebus extra rent if she has to amputate his limb. In the movie, one of Clint Eastwood's legs is indeed removed. However, it is hard to see that this story is a "parody" of the movie. Only the basic situations are similar.

On page 15 of issue # 23, it transpires that Madame Dupont is, in fact, the alias for a male alchemist named "Professor Charles X Claremont". Claremont requires the schoolgirls as a focus for a magic spell to resurrect "the apocalypse beast." Anyone who has ever read a comic book will instantly know that Charles Xavier is the leader of the X-Men and that Chris Claremont was the long running writer of that comic. Prof. X's team of teenage superheroes is also based in a private school. But anyone who has NOT read a comic book would miss very little of what's going on in the rest of the story. Some of Claremont's speech mannerisms, and some of the poses he is drawn in, are a little like those of Prof. X; and, his physical appearance (bald, aquiline features) are indeed a caricature of the Marvel hero.

At the end of the episode it turns out that the Apocalypse Beast is a female, because Claremont has used girls, rather than boys, as a focus for his spell. He calls the beast "Woman-Thing." This is indeed only funny if you've heard of the Marvel character "Man Thing", and if you know that Chris Claremont had a policy of writing against gender stereotypes. In the the following issue, it transpires that a wizard named Sump has also created a monster, named "Sump Thing". Again, comic book readers will instantly spot that this is a reference to DC's "Swamp Thing." Again, I am not sure how relevant this is to the rest of the comic, which is mainly concerned with a ludicrous artist who paints topless women but claims that their breasts represent "the conflict between short term profit gouging and nest-egg mercantile capitalism."

These issues certainly have a lot of intertextual references: to Clint Eastwood, The X-Men, Swamp Thing, Man Thing, possibly to Frank Frazetta. But the humour comes mainly from the social comedy of Cerebus' interaction with the schoolgirls, and the very broad farce of the two monsters having noisy, messy sex. Is this parody? Among other things. Is this only parody? Certainly not. And in the next episode, we embark on "High Society" which is a compelling political novel set in a believable (if absurd) imaginary world. The best issue ("The Night Before",) is a character piece with no external reference at all.

I suspect that the only people who write Cerebus off as a parody comic are the ones who didn't get past issue 6.

The "little-cramped-panels" bit bemuses me. Presumably, crazy letters from George Perez (who thinks nothing of putting 100 panels on one page) are more reprehensible than ones from John Byrne (who loves big panels and double page spreads) -- with Sim somewhere in between?

Since "misogynist" is precisely the contested word, I think we should be careful of how we use it Early Cerebus sometimes used stock situations -- the nymphomaniac woman with the husband who really isn't interested; the fierce mother in law; the prissy school girls -- to comedy effect. Some of those situations could be said to be "sexist". To infer "misogynist" from that seems to take us back to the world of the 1980's when the Greater London Council were banning pantomimes because Widow Twanky said "Silly old cow!" to her, er, cow. You can think that the interplay between Cerebus and Red Sophia is very funny without Hating Women.

(To digress. Dave Sim seems to have lucid periods and less lucid periods. Most of Following Cerebus is perfectly coherent. I agree that, even in his lucid state Dave has a set of socially conservative beliefs -- extreme, but rational. For example, Lucid-Dave says that it doesn't make sense for a woman to go to work, on very low wages, while another woman is paid very low wages to take care of her child, and for a third woman to pay tax to pay the second woman. Unfortunately, when he's Off On One, Mad-Dave is just as likely to add that wife beating is not merely permissible, but actually a duty, and that women are certainly not rational and may not even be sentient, and 1960s pop music was a gnostic allegory. I suspect that Lucid-Dave does not clearly remember some of the things which Mad-Dave has written, which is why you get remarks like ""I simply say that state funded day-care is a lousy way to bring up kids and everyone calls me a misogynist." )

It seems to me that the question that Rich actually meant to ask me was: "Can someone explain why being either the greatest cartoonist whoever lived or else merely the greatest since Wil Eisner means that even Dave Sim's crazy faxes have to be agonized over."

This is a very good question.

The answer is, of course, biographical. I am the kind of person who thinks that the the mere existence of John Lennon: Plastic Ono Band is sufficient reason to listen to Two Virgins, although not often. I think that Parsifal is the single greatest work of art ever produced by a human being: to me, that confers some interest on Rienzi. I don't say that this is the best way to be; I don't say that this is the only way to be; but it happens to be the way I am. If I had to explain it, I would say that I have a scholarly interest in certain subjects: it isn't enough for me to say that I like a particular writer or composer; I want to understand them, which may involve finding out where they came from and where they went to. But it also comes from a collectors mentality; a desire to "complete the set" – something which is, I admit, almost unprecedented among comic-book enthusiasts.

So, yes: it is of interest to me that the-creator-of-one-of-only-two-funny-books-that-deserve-the-name-graphic-novel has done something crazy. Again.

And it is of very great interest to me that the greatest-cartoonist-of-all-time-or-possibly-merely-the-greatest-since-Wil-Eisner has produced not one, but two, new comic books.

One

I piss on the evil of that film. He's raped my childhood

Anonymous Star Wars fan .

There is a theory, held by some ancient Greeks and the majority of modern geeks, which says that there is no difference between aesthetic and moral judgment. If a work of art is aesthetically bad; then it is also immoral by definition. And if a work of art is immoral then it is necessarily an aesthetically and creatively poor piece of work. The Phantom Menace is a Bad Film; therefore George Lucas is a Bad Man because he made the Bad Film. It follows that if I go and see the Bad Man's Film, I will be a Bad Man too. This is a very good theory because it allows us to make critical judgements about films, books and comics without actually going to the bother of reading them.

"Our aspirations, cunt? Folk on t'fucking dole

Have got about as much scope to aspire

Above the shit they're dumped in, cunt, as coal

"Aspires" to be thrown on t'fucking fire."

Tony Harrison

In 1987, one Mary Whitehouse wrote to the Independent to complain about the publication of V, a poem by Tony Harrison, which the author had also read out loud on Channel 4. The poem (an imaginary dialogue between the poet and a skinhead who had vandalized his parents' gravestone) contained an unusually large number of very rude words.

The sainted Mrs Whitehouse wrote:

"It seems to me a matter more of aesthetics than morality, except in so far as an unsolicited affront can always raise moral issues. The four letter word, referring as it does to sexual intercourse, has with in its very sound, let alone context, a harshness, even brutality, that negates and destroys the nature of the love, sensitivity and commitment which is or should be its very essence."

Her first point – that printing the word fuck over and over again in a national newspaper is bad manners, is debatable. But her second point -- that fuck is a Bad Word and that just saying it (in any context) "negates" human sexuality -- borders on the pathological. If she is correct, you don't need to think about what the poem says, or the way in which it says it. Once you know that it contains the Bad Word, you know that it is a Bad Poem, that it was written by a Bad Man, and that reading it will make you Bad. (See Note 1)

And there are lots of other Magic Words apart from fuck.

When, long ago, the gods created Earth

In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.

The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;

Yet were they too remote from humankind.

To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,

The Olympian host conceived a clever plan.

A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,

Filled it with vice, and called the thing a nigger.

H.P Lovecraft

The Shadow Over Innsmouth is one of the finest works of gothic horror ever written. (The Call of Cthulhu is more famous and more influential, but The Shadow Over Innsmouth is better written.) The theme – that there are some questions that it would be better not to ask – is as old as Oedipus Rex. The hero investigates strange goings on in an isolated town and spots that many of the inhabitants have strange heads and funny eyes. By degrees, he learns that this is because there has been intermarriage between humans and sea monsters called "deep ones". The fish-faced people are the off-spring of these unions, and they will eventually lose their humanity altogether. Inevitably, on the final page the narrator learns that his own family have links with Innsmouth, and that he himself will one day turn into a fish-man.

On a first reading of the story, it's possible to ignore or glide over its unpleasant sub-text: the fear of outsiders, the revulsion towards those who look different from you and above all the terror of miscegenation, of learning that you have impure blood. (People who believe in the Unity of the Literary Virtues often also suffer from Sub-Text Blindness, also known by the technical term " Oh stop reading things into it it's only a bloody horror story.") But once you know that the author of The Shadow Over Innsmouth also wrote The Creation of Niggers, the sub-text pretty much jumps out and hits you in the face. What follows?

1: The Creation of Niggers is a Bad Poem. Therefore Lovecraft was a Bad Man. Therefore, Shadow Over Innsmouth is a Bad Story. If you read Shadow over Innsmouth, it will make you Bad.

2: Since Shadow Over Innsmouth is a good story, Lovecraft must have been a good man, so The Creation of Niggers must be a good poem. Therefore, I must give at least some degree of consideration to the idea that people with dark skin are sub-human.

3: Since the author of Shadow over Innsmouth also wrote The Creation of Niggers, it is irrelevant whether or not Shadow Over Innsmouth is a good story. Lovecraft is a Bad Man and you shouldn't read the Bad Man's work, even when it is good.

Knowing that Lovecraft wrote the racist poem unquestionably affects how your read his horror stories. Does it necessarily determine whether you read them? (See NOTE 2)

"Hobbits delighted in such things, if they were accurate: they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions."

Tolkien

Some theorists see the Unity of the Literary Virtues in economic terms. "If I read the Bad Book, I will be giving the Bad Man some of my money," they say. "Since giving money to Bad Men makes you Bad, I will not read the Bad Book even if I'm actually quite interested in it." Some people qualify this and say that reading Bad Books only makes you Bad while the author is still alive. It's okay to read Shadow Over Innsmouth now Lovecraft is dead and can't profit by it; if he were alive, it wouldn't be. I don't know whether the fact that he was on a page rate rather than a royalty scheme affects his badness one way or the other.

I have no particular problem with consumer boycotts – refusing to buy a particular product in order to make a particular political point. But you should be very careful not to confuse the political with the aesthetic. I might very well say "I will not buy a Marvel Comic until the company credits Jack Kirby as creator of the Fantastic Four". But I would not add "Since Kirby deserves to be credited, 1602 is badly written" or "Since you think that 1602 is well-written, you obviously think Stan Lee created the Fantastic Four."

Ideological boycotts are much more slippery. It sounds fine and dandy to say "Insulting the Prophet Mohammed is Very Bad. The man who wrote the book insulting the Prophet Mohammed is therefore a Very Bad Man. Therefore no one should buy, read, display, publish, print or distribute the Very Bad Man's book. But obviously, that isn't the same as censorship." After all, if Islam is true, then insulting the Prophet is very bad: much worse than saying that women shouldn't have the vote. If Christianity is true, then denying that Jesus is God is very bad, maybe as bad as denying the Holocaust. If God is a delusion, than promoting Catholicism is (I read in an impeccable source) even worse than sexually molesting children. So it follows that Muslims should abstain from reading anti-Muslim books; Christians from anti-Christian books; and atheists from...well, from practically everything. No-one should read anything except things they already agree with.

When I refuse to read books which I don't agree with, I am exercising reasonable choice as a consumer. But of course, when you do it, you are being narrow minded and bigoted.

There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written . That is all.

Oscar Wilde

Works of art contain ideas.

Those ideas are part of the work. "Siegfried contains anti-Semitic ideas" is a true fact, as true as "Siegfried contains a French Horn solo."

But we cannot easily go from "Siegfried contains anti-Semitic ideas" to "Siegfried is an anti-Semitic work". The ideology of a work doesn't reside in a single image, a single scene, or a single word. Mrs. Whitehouse thought that counting the number of "fucks" was a good gauge of whether or not a poem was obscene. (If the number was greater than zero, it was.) Dr Wertham said, in so many words, that if a comic book depicted a crime being committed, then it was a "crime comic", and that "crime comics" made kids criminals. In fact, if an opera or a comic book has an ideology, it must be contained in the whole work. Many of the Batman comics that Wertham wanted to protect us from were actually highly moralistic. The views about language expressed in V were actually not a million miles from Mrs. Whitehouse's own. The only way you can find out what a book "says" is by, er, actually reading it.

In fact, I am very doubtful whether any artistic work can ever be said to "say" something in such a narrow sense. Does Macbeth say "Political violence is sometimes a necessary evil" (which would make it a Bad Play) or "Your crimes will always catch up with you in the end" (which makes it a Good Play)? Or does it say "Don't trust your wife", "Don't try to force your spineless husband to get on," "Beware of soothsayers" or "I think James will be an excellent King so could I have a job please?"I don't think that you can say what Macbeth says in less words than the actual text of Macbeth.

But even if you can extract "The Meaning of the Work" from the Work Itself, I doubt whether agreement or disagreement with that Meaning is particularly relevant to your appreciation of the The Work. The Taming of the Shrew says "Strong women are ridiculous". Does it follow that those of us who do not think that strong women are particularly ridiculous cannot find the play funny? Does our approval or disapproval of political assassination determine in advance whether or not we will think that Julius Caesar is a good play. Can members of Amnesty International watch 24?

Writing about music, as the fellow said, is like dancing about architecture.

NOTE 1

One the nasty things about grown ups is that they can't believe that children have any sense of justice; indeed any opinions of any kind. If Jimmy complains that he had been queuing politely for 20 minutes and then Joey came along and pushed to the front of the line, grown-ups are inclined to say "Oh, you kids, always finding something to quarrel about. Put a sock in it or you'll both get a slap."

The BBC's recent docu-drama about Mary Whitehouse seemed to treat everyone involved as quarreling children. What occurred during the 1960s was an argument about ideas. One side thought that the state funded public service broadcasting company in a Christian country should broadly reflect Christian value -- or at any rate the consensus values of the people who paid for it. The other side thought that it was the BBC's duty to produce high-quality, cutting edge artistic work, which (by definition) would sometimes offend people. The play chose to represent the argument as a private spat between the head of the BBC (a comedy dirty old man) and a "clean up TV" represented by a dotty old biddy. Whatever the argument was about, it wasn't about that.

Oh: and she was quite right about "Tomb of the Cybermen."

NOTE 2

It is a truism of the Unity of the Virtues theory that once we know that a work is morally bad, we can assume that it is aesthetically bad. So it's probably worth saying that "The Creation of Niggers" is, in its lavatory-wall kind of way, not a bad piece of work. The rhymes (birth/earth designed/humankind) trip of the tongue reasonably well and the scansion doesn't feel too forced. Lovecraft cleverly uses strong rhymes to make us anticipate the end of the sentence before we get to it, and saves the Bad Word to the very end of the poem. We hear "semi-human figure" and think "oh...he can't be going to...he did." (A reasonable amount of music hall comedy involves using rhyme to make us expect a rude word, and then not actually saying it.)

A great deal of Lovecraft's work is about language -- over and over again, a complete collapse of syntax signifies that the the heroes of his stories have learned something that it would have been better never to have found out. And of course, his demons have weird names that are all but unpronounceable. When people see the Great Old Ones they often announce that they are unspeakable, ineffable, "unnameable." It is rather interesting that, when deliberately trying to be offensive, Lovecraft should structure a short poem around a word which is "unspeakable" in a different way.

So: the 2009 season of Torchwood will have only 5 episodes, and RTD gets an OBE.

If he'd canceled it altogether, would he have got a knighthood?

I am resigning from the opposition because I oppose the policy of the government.

Er...I haven't thought this through properly, have I?

Head. Wall. Bang. Bang. Bang.

Been trying to think of some witty and ironic comment to make about this. But words really, really fail me.

4:9 The Forest of the Dead

***

In the unlikely event that anyone cares, these are the clips of my gig review slot on Sophie's Radio Bristol Show.


Sandi Thom

Chambao

Vince Freeman

Gogol Bordello

Gwyneth Herbert

Robin Williamson and John Renbourne

Alabama 3

Tom McCrae / Hotel Cafe

Crystal Castles

Kimya Dawson

Morcheeba

It's stuff like this that gets geeks a bad name.

4.8 Silence in the Library

"Silence in the Library" was a nice episode of Doctor Who. I enjoyed it very much indeed.

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