listen

Have you been listening to anything good lately..?

My current favourite 'spoken word' listens are This Jungian Life (content-rich, yet also has a warmth to it, perhaps something to do with vocal timbre - so the psychotherapeutic equivalent of watching 'All Creatures Great and Small' with grandparents at some imagined cosy teatime during the late postwar consensus), Our Opinions are Correct (SFF/H genre stuff from Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, almost at 150 episodes now, all of them good) & Classroom Psychology with Dr Cora Sergeant (about how gender variance shows up in education and across society: I like the gracious yet pointed approach of taking public figures' transphobic or just ignorant public statements as 'the questions they were so clearly intended to be').

Other podcast listens: Pluto Press (Radicals in Conversation) / The Verso Podcast / Zer0 Books & Repeater Media / Houston We Have A Podcast (NASA) / The Good Robot / The Angry Clean Energy Guy

Also, audio books: Ulysses this autumn, The Brothers Karamazov this spring. Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan are excellent interpreters of the former. As for the lattter, Dostoyevsky is very good at abnormal psychology, addiction and intense situations and the narrator, Luke Thompson, is also great at ‘doing the voices’ and particularly at drawing out the weird, subterranean hilarity that gleams through the text at moments. He gives a particularly good turn when portraying the drunken voluptuary Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov at his varying levels of inebriation and shame and the self-conscious, priggish ‘1840s liberal’ Pyotr Alexandrovich Musov whom he baits relentlessly during their encounter in the monastic cell of the Elder Zosima. Fyodor’s manservant Grigory and his possible illegitimate son Smerdyakov have Yorkshire accents, which kind of works...
 

superman: you'll believe...

 

"Unlike the seventies Superman, who suffered from all the angst and self-doubt that has washed over the entire comic-book field since Stan Lee's early sixties innovations in Spider-Man, the movie Superman has a clearcut sense of purpose and no conflicts of ideological interests (could Superman have intervened in the Vietnam war or in the Middle East? On which side? Why?)"

- Charles Shaar Murray, NME, 23rd December 1978

 

The original Superman and Star Wars movies (late 1970s) were revisionist-or-perhaps-I-mean-revanchist enterprises: while turbo-charging genre cinema, they may also have sought to empty it in some important respects...

 

I loved both franchises, needless to say - little did I then know (aged 8 to 10) that, in my innocent magnetic attraction to these instantiations of the hero's-journey mythos, I was in some wise the dupe of the hegemonic late-capitalist culture industry as it prepared the ground for the Reagan-Thatcher axis and all the awfulness that followed...