Riding the Waves to Eternity: Hangin’ with the Cosmic Surfer

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Stick ’em With The Pointy End

May 5, 2019 | Goggle-eyes

In which I refer to

  • Avengers: Endgame
  • Game of Thrones: The Long Night
  • American Gods: Moon Shadow

There are spoilers for Game of Thrones so look away if that’s not your thing.

A couple of months ago (Higher, Further, Faster Baby) I wrote

I’m not really interested in the Avengers franchise and wasn’t especially impressed by Infinity War which I thought was more spectacle than substance.

That didn’t stop me going to see Endgame and I’m glad I did. It was, as my daughter said, entirely the perfect amount of over the top. I was sceptical going in but won over by the end. That’s not to say I didn’t think there are problems with the large cast and how the story lines are handled, but in the end resistance is futile. And it was quite funny too.

A difficulty the makers might not have expected is that Endgame was released a couple of days before Game of Thrones delivered the third episode of season eight: The Long Night. As, I think, everyone will know by now, the entire episode was consumed by the great battle with the Night King. The final battle in Endgame was epic for Marvel values of epic, but The Long Night easily topped it by focusing up close and personal on hand-to-hand conflict, varying the pace and tone from time to time to keep the viewer engaged in the overwhelming spectacle of it all.

I found myself wondering over a coffee about the function of the Night King and his army of the dead, about whether there is a deeper metaphorical value in play. Specifically, if defeat of the dead (assuming they’re defeated, there are still three episodes to go) operates as an unshackling of the past that informs the dynastic game for the throne. The dynasties and houses are part of the dead past, and thus the eventual occupant of the throne, assuming the throne is still a prize worth having by the end, may well be representative of the change, someone other than a member of the traditional Houses. Defeating the dead overturns the rules we thought we were playing by. It’s the same change that sees Brienne of Tarth knighted against the rules that governed the past, perhaps foreshadowing what is to come.

The dead are also, in their way, an operative manifestation, a personification, of Deep Time, but I haven’t thought that one through at a thematic level.

Having said all that, I’m not sure if that way of thinking is how Benioff and Weiss approach this. GRRM might, particularly the GRRM of the first three books in the series, but the subsequent books have been meandering messes.

And then there was the final episode of season two of American Gods. The latter half of the season was better to the first, but it was nowhere by comparison to Endgame or The Long Night; it didn’t have the style, the substance, or the entertainment value of either. I stuck with it in the hope that something might engage me (in the way that Laura Moon and Mad Sweeney did in season one) but it didn’t. I hope they sort themselves out for the next season, but I may bail on it in the way I eventually bailed on Supergirl.

Other viewing entertainment last week was to revisit

  • John Wick
  • John Wick Chapter 2
  • Guardians of the Galaxy 2

All entertaining and, in the case of GOTG2, better on a second watching.

Hello Hello, Welcome To Your Bright New Future

May 4, 2019 | Retirement, Shirkers

Moving into month two and perspectives are changing. It is true that, when planing to go away for a couple of days next week, my brain wondered if I could get a couple of days leave, but it is also true that when I woke up this morning it took me a while to decide it was probably Saturday.

*

One of my favourite bands is one I never saw live, Tansads. I remember hearing Up The Revolution on the Radio, and Johnny Walker played them a lot. Four of their albums are easy enough to find, although I think I got some via second-hand shops on Amazon.fr because of scalping prices in Amazon UK. However their final album, Reason To Be, released after the original band broke up, is harder to find and is very different. Tansads featured the twin vocal attack of Andrew Kettle and Janet Anderton, and the contrast in their voices delivering no-nonsense lyrics was one of the things I found irresistable. Reason To Be is essentially a vehicle for Janet’s voice only. Indeed, for a while the band went under the name ‘Jane Doe’ before reverting back to Tansads.

Janet Anderton

I’d seen a lot of comment on the album which, if not negative, implied it wasn’t as good as earlier efforts. Nonetheless, in a spirit of completism, I decided to track it down.

I had a search in place on ebay for a long time, and let a copy on Discogs pass because I thought it was too expensive. Finally a copy came up for auction and a last-seconds snipe on my part meant I finally got it (and at a sensible price).

When it arrived I put it on with some trepidation, hoping it wouldn’t discolour my long-time enjoyment of the band. In fact just the opposite happened: I love it.

It is certainly different to the earlier material, but it stands up in its own right. There is a thunderous power rocker called Hello which I often put on repeat in the shed. Unfortunately the band finally split after Reason To Be until a series of reunion gigs that I found out about too late. From the ashes of Tansads came Merry Hell who share some personnel and material with Tansads but are going in their own direction.

And they don’t have Janet Anderton’s voice. I don’t know what Janet is doing now, and as far as I know she is no longer singing. That’s a shame as she was one of the great voices of British indie-pop/rock/folk.