nixsight

Jeremy Paxman is doing the full Morris, about the spree shootings earlier today, so it seems like as good a time as any to escape into the brighter, sharper world of Lost.

Oh, yeah, I forgot… Previously on Lost, three beloved characters got obliterated. One literally, and two disposed of at the bottom of the ocean, where their bodies won’t ever be retrieved. Sigh.

So, we start on Jack’s eye – this shot is a favourite convention of the show, and if somebody hasn’t already compiled all of them together, somewhere, it’s bound to happen soon enough.

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So Jack saved Locke, and he thinks he’s a candidate for a surgery that Jack is developing. John Locke doesn’t want to be a candidate, though. He seems to recognise the phrase. Jack could do with having House MD on his side.

Jack wakes to Sayid telling him that they’re on Hydra island. Sayid even makes a joke. Actually, I reckon Sayid might be back on the turn again.

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Jack’s sweetest moment in ages was last episode, where he deferred to Hurley. Now he asks Hurley’s permission to go and talk to non-Locke. It is a lovely moment.

And now non-Locke admits what we had already worked out – that he was the vision of Jack’s father from way back in that first or second episode. He says it was because they needed to find water. And that makes a certain amount of logical sense, but it’s difficult not to see that it was a pretty cruel choice to make on non-Locke’s part.
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Two reflective blog posts about (oh dear) bigotgate, that don’t entirely gel with my own thoughts, but are worth a read:

Angry Mob – “You Can’t Talk About Immigration”:

I was pretty certain that the Daily Mail runs huge amounts of stories about immigration, as does the Express, the Sun and other tabloid newspapers. These tabloids and some of the broadsheets also point out that if we reach a population of 70million because of immigration bad things will happen and life in Britain may well end. Immigration, immigration, immigration. One of the key issues of this election. Everyone is talking about it. When prospective and current PMs go on Radio 1 it is the main issue that young voters want to bring up. As far as I can perceive: everyone wants to know what is going to be done about immigration, and they are not shy to talk about it.

Yet it turns out I am badly mistaken, because of course ‘You can’t talk about immigration.’

Elmyra – “I Am An Eastern European”

At that point I completely lost it. I’m not sure I can explain how this whole sordid affair makes me feel, but let me try.

Anger. Anger at Gillian Duffy, anger at all the people who weren’t willing to stand up to her.

Shame. Shame at the realisation that I had only allowed myself to feel this anger after I had been “given permission” by the comment from the native British person who stood up for me. Blaming myself for not standing up for myself earlier, more forcefully.

A desperate need to justify myself. I pay higher-rate income tax. I contribute to the UK economy, I contribute to UK society. I probably pay into the tax system more than I get back out of it. Extending that justification to other immigrants – parts of the UK economy probably would collapse without immigrant labour; I wonder how much immigrants contribute in total to the economy; we all come here to work, and we work damn hard. A range of other economic arguments, all around contribution, all around this incredibly Tory notion of my money being the only thing that entitles me to anything like decent treatment from this society.

More anger. This time at being disempowered and disenfranchised; at being a cheap target for political point scoring because Gillian Duffy and the 60 million people like her have a vote, and I and the couple of hundred thousand people like me don’t, and therefore she will always get a grovelling apology from the Prime Minister, and we won’t.

Mili’s post is well-written and quite sad, and while I think that a lot of people over-reacted to the situation yesterday, I should state right now that I entirely understand why she, as an immigrant, and one from the same group that was mentioned so often yesterday, might feel marginalised or upset by the situation, or more accurately by the fallout. But I have to say that my experience on Twitter yesterday was, barring one particular exception, completely opposite to hers. I found there was no shortage of people attacking Duffy, or defending Gordon Brown. Actually more common in my timeline was people attacking Duffy and attacking Gordon Brown!

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Always lots of music memes around, but here’s the possible seed of a comic one, that Ryan K Lindsay shared. I guess he started it?

Anyway, here are my responses. Feel free to steal this and use it for yourself, and if you remember, send Ryan a link to it, as he’s interested!

1-Did you read comics as a kid?

Yup… From pretty early on, actually. Not sure if I was reading comics as soon as I was reading full-stop, but near enough. My paternal grandfather was, I think, of a generation that just read comics as a matter of course, and he still did, so I remember getting old Harvey and Laurel And Hardy comics from him.

Later on, on a wet holiday in Wales, some friends of the family took pity on me and brought a giant stack of Marvel reprint comics over for me, which I devoured. I got to keep them, and some of them are probably still around somewhere. I reckon I’d read some old Lee/Kirby reprints before then, but this was my first proper introduction to that world, of semi-realistic artwork and melodrama.

And at some point during all this, Eagle relaunched, so that’s when I started reading British comics. I think of them as three very seperate introductions, though they all feed into the same love of the medium.

(Two things worth noting – backwhen, it wasn’t unusual for people to just dump piles of comics, either on bored visiting kids, or at coffee-morning boot-sales for pennies. Course, reprint comics aren’t ever worth very much, but people are a little more cautious about such things now, I think. Also worth noting: I don’t remember when I started reading Tintin or Asterix, and I think this is because nobody treated those as comics – they were books, that you borrowed from the library, and there was nothing at all unusual about them.)

2-Who bought you your first comic?

Probably the same grandfather, actually – though to be honest, I’m not sure whether the comics he gave me were new or hand-me-downs.

More clear in my memory are the times when we visited relatives in London… though there were always UK reprints or comics about – more like magazines, really – I’ve always thought of US comics – with their smaller and to my eyes cooler size, and full-colour – as being the platonic ideal of periodical comics. I think it was scarcity that gave me this impression. None of the shops around us had them, but most of the newsagents in London seemed to – some of them weren’t so good at getting rid of old stock, so had piles of them, too!

I only ever had enough pocket money to pick up one or two at a time, so I can still remember some of them really clearly.

The other time I count as being the first time I bought/was bought comics was when I found a newsagent in my home town that sold US Marvel comics. This was like a miracle to the younger Nick, on a par with the later discovery of comic speciality shops.

The first two locally-sourced US Marvel comics I ever bought were:

Look at that Charles Vess cover on the Spider-Man!

I’d read the X-Men before, in reprints of the original team’s earliest adventures, but I think I’d only really got to know this newer iteration in the previous year’s “Secret Wars”, which I’d read in UK magazine format. There was always a tinge of social commentary in Lee and Kirby’s originating run, but this issue closed with Professor X being viciously beaten and left for dead by a gang of anti-mutant teenagers, which was a total eye-opener for me. I was oblivious to the more mature corners of the British comic scene at this point. It was this, not Watchmen or DKR, that made me realise that comics could make an actual point, as well as contain realistic violence and drama that might have real consequences.

Also, the panels of the beaten Professor X were the point at which I became truly aware of John Romita Jr – though it later turned out I’d seen his artwork before, in reprinted Iron Man comics, Uncanny X-Men #192 was the beginning of my continuing love-affair with the artist. It’s all about the difference the inker makes, in this case: Dan Green and Steve Leialoha put a roughness into Romita Jr’s art that wasn’t in the much cleaner ink-job on Iron Man, and every notable comic I’ve seen him work on since had taken advantage of that raw edge to his work. Kick-Ass was practically built on the back of it.

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In #MOMBcast 19, we talked about the following comics:

@JamesMOMB
15:40 Captain America Reborn #6 (Ed Brubaker/Bryan Hitck/Butch Guice)
22:00 Robocop #1 (Rob Williams/Fabiano Neves)

@JaneMOMB
32:00 Madame Xanadu #19 (Matt Wagner/Joëlle Jones)
37:00 Demonic #1 (Robert Kirkman/Marc Silvestri)
47:00 Tracker #1 (Jonathan Lincoln/Francis Tsai)
55:00 45 (Andi Ewington/Various)

@Nixsight
59:00 Detective Comics #861 (Greg Rucka/Jock)
01:03:05 Batman & Robin #7 (Grant Morrison/Cameron Stewart)
01:06:30 Thor #606 (Kieron Gillen/Billy Tan)
01:08:30 Kick-Ass #8 (Mark Millar/John Romita Jr)

01:19:00 Nocturne Hotel (Eddie Robson/Simon van Alphen)
01:20:30 PJANG (Rol Hirst/Various)

01:24:30 Tintin – Secret of the Unicorn/Red Rackham’s Treasure (Hergé)

Nocturne Hotel: Purchase at Lulu.com
Rol Hirst & PJANG: http://rolhirst.co.uk/

MOMBcast 19 and all other episodes are available here: http://dimitrimomb.libsyn.com/

In #MOMBcast 18, we talked about the following comics:

@nixsight
12:00 Joe The Barbarian #1
20:00 Spider-Woman #5

@Chris_TOMP
30:00 Spider-Woman #5
37:00 Thunderbolts #140

@JaneMOMB
54:00 Joe The Barbarian #1
56:00 Neonomicon Preview

@JamesMOMB
01:05:00 The Outsiders
01:07:30 Dark Avengers #13

01:18:00 S.W.O.R.D cancellation whinge
01:29:00 Daredevil by @Chris_TOMP

MOMBcast 18 and all other episodes are available here: http://dimitrimomb.libsyn.com/

In #MOMBcast 17, we talked about the following comics:
@RichMOMB
18:00 Die Hard Year One #4
23:10 Daytripper #2

@JaneMOMB
30:30 Talisman #3
33:00 Dingo #1 & #2

@nixsight
44:00 Invincible Iron Man #22
51:00 S.W.O.R.D #3

@JamesMOMB
01:02:00 Weekly World News #1
01:12:00 Punisher@ Get Castle

01:35:00 45 Blue Spear one-shot chat.
01:40:00 The Siege#1 & Siege Embedded #1

MOMBcast 17 and all other episodes are available here: http://dimitrimomb.libsyn.com/

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The post I sent out yesterday, about my problems with the way articles about gang-rape and prostitution were being written at both the BBC and The Guardian, was more controversial than I had intended, garnering a comment from a gentleman I hadn’t heard of before, Julian Real, which sought to come down quite heavily on me over some perceived issues with my argument.

Though I was initially quite shaken by the comment – aggressively worded criticism always gets the adrenaline flowing in uncomfortable ways, after all, especially when you’re too responsive to verbal bullying like I am – and people told me not “to feed the troll”, in Real’s arguments I actually saw some places where I could make my points more clearly, and also gained a little more confidence in the points I was initially hoping to make, as well.

I know I sometimes appear quite opinionated, but personally at least, I’ve always seen an initial statement as a jumping off point, from which all the people in a discussion can inform, correct and self-correct, and my opinions, though idealistically quite consistent, are always fluid where details, clarification and validation are concerned.

So Mr Real’s comment gave me the opportunity to look over what I’d written, and explain what I meant on the bits he disagreed with, and that’s been a fun exercise. I don’t think I will have changed his mind, but then, that’s not really what I hope to do to people. I barely know my own mind – it’d be a bad idea to try and change anyone else’s.

Anyway, I was quite happy with my response to his comment here, but then I realised that I didn’t know what he’d said over at his site. If he’d pointed his readers at my post, and his comment, I didn’t want my clarifications to pass them by. So over I went.

The first paragraph said this:

I found this silly blogpost today. And I responded. The the post by nixsight follows, and where I found it can be seen by clicking on the link in this sentence. On his own blog, his words are not so rudely interrupted by mine. But that was then, and this is here.

Things kind of went downhill from there.

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I concluded from this that it’s not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it’s sometimes men themselves.
Why men use prostitutes

There’s a lot wrong with that sentence. For a start, the fact that there’s no “just” in between “not” and “feminists” is telling.

It’s a peculiar sort of person who will take the words of obviously confused or disturbed individuals, and draw conclusions that pull in a whole gender. Or even a whole subset of a gender.

One can’t conclude from the words of a suicidal female office worker that all office workers are suicidal, let alone that all women are.

I’m getting a little bit tired of sex-negative writing at the moment. For sure, there is trafficking and abuse in the sex industry, and something should be done about it, but we – and certainly, The Guardian – should be at the point where the discussion is more insightful and specific, and less blunt and general.

Certainly, it may say something about how objective a writer wants to be when they are using data from a very limited survey, and not giving much away about how they came across the responders.

There are many erudite and pragmatic ex and current sex-workers writing on and off the internet. There’s really no excuse any more to use the word “prostitute” as short-hand for “trafficked” or “exploited”. Even if it’s the case that the majority of people in the industry are either one of those things, applying that sort of binary thinking to the issue isn’t moving discussion of it along at all.

I’ve realised today that my relationship with The Guardian is similar to the one I had with the NME – in that I started reading both at around the same point in my life, and allowed myself to identify with them a little – but for some reason I never grew out of the former the way I did the latter. Helpfully, the paper’s online provision is sorting that out.

(Cross-Posted from Tumblr)