Why I’m Not Playing Batman: Arkham Asylum

It was supposed to be very good, and as a game maybe it is, if you can get over the ugliness that comes with every game made with the new unreal engine. Maybe the combats good if you learn the inelegant and unintuitive controls.

But I’m not going to find out because I’m not going to play it. Why? Harley Quinn. What they did with Harley Quinn, the Joker’s sidekick, was to dress her up in a leather corset, thy boots and tiny rah-rah skirt. Now, that’s not Harley’s costume, but ok, whatever, a nurses outfit sure, a sex, twisted nurse’s outfit even. But a leather bondage nurses outfit? Really? When EVERY other character is given a very traditional costume. And what’s the First thing you see her do? She gives a lap dance to a the captured warden.

So: rampant misogyny, but not just misogyny, they are taking SOMEONE ELSES CHARACTER and prostituting her. They are allowed to do this because the money in games is good enough. But why the stripper act? Why is that the first thing she does? Because some middle manager insisted that you needed some eye candy for the dribbling teenage boys. It’s so the spotty fuckers don’t need to turn of their PS3 in order to masturbate. Don’t worry boys, just make it to the next cut scene and you can squirt one out. Eidos are the producers of the game, and they are mind pimps. And by pimp I don’t mean purple suite and befeathered hat. I mean intelectual rapists and degenerates. Parasites or the most reprehensible order.

They don’t respect their characters, and I care about characters, so they don’t respect me. Fuck them and their ugly interactive porn magazines.

Cotarded

Cotard's syndrome, or Cotard's delussion is a bit like amnessia. None of the symptoms are symilar in any way and it would be impossible to misdiagnose one for t'other. But they are similar. Amnesia is the loss of memory, we all know that if we've ever watched a soap or watched a film, like, ever. Writers just love it becuase it's an increadiby powerful tool. If amnessia didn't exist then artists would have invented it becuase it's so perfect as a narative device.

Cotard's syndrome is a belief that you're dead. It's cause by brain lessions that sepperate the sense of self from the experiance of the world. The result is that the world the sufferer sees no longer seems real, their body included, and so the most common conclussion is that they are dead. They are in hell as a spirit, or that their body is decomposing.

I'm trying to write a comic scrip at the momnbet, and the basic premise revolves around the idea that a person has cotard's syndrome, they no longer pecive the world as real, but instead of assuming they are dead, they come to the understanding that the world is dead. That human experiance the world in a way so as to put a skien of existences over the nothingness that underpins the world. He's had the delusion from birth and so he never had the socialisation that led him to assume he was dead in the smae way other sufferers had.

This might end up as a book rather than a comic. Who knows. Maybe my dissertaion.

But his dellusion is deluded, that's the way the world is, arguably, it's just humans can't look past the skien of reality. I think there are bhudest principles around this. My character isn't enligntened. It isn't a gift or a superpower. But it makes him important.

It does mean that ideas are as real as humans, or chairs, or whatever (becuase nothing is real, it's all a level playing fireld) but they have no phisical presence on the skien, they exist slightly above it. Or beside it.

Except they do have a presence, in art. In stories. They are the phisical bodies of ideas.

This might have to be in a novel. Bugger. I wanted to write a comic. Maybe I should do something else for the comic? Maybe my first abortive novel? That worked horribly as a novel. Might work well as a comic.

Pop is a parasite

Fantasies, the new Metric album, is just fun. It doesn't recreate music, it has some nice lines but lyrically (Who'd you rather be,the Beatles or the Rolling Stones) but never more insightful or inspiring then any other band. What it has is melody and hooks. That's what pop lives off of. Pop is a parasite. It aims to embed itself into your brain, a memetic virus. They're more like bacteria I guess. Each line sound, or played is a strand of memetic information, and if it's successful it will get inside you and you'll hum it to yourself on the train and thing, yeah, I'll listen to Metric. Or in my case I'll buy it instead of streaming it from Spotify. Replication! Hooray.

Also, I'm mainly writing this because the Pitchfork review of Fantasies is tripe. I'm not going to link it because that's too much effort, but the reviewer spends half of it talking about Metric's back catalogue and showing off about how much he knows about them, even when it's not relevant - Yeah, that's great you know that their second album was really a reworking of their first, unreleased album from before they signed. If you don't then discuss how this album fits into the greater arc of their career it's irrelevant. Then he (or she) says that it's OK but they would make a good ambient band.

While I'm here, Mercury press seems to be all about how rubbish the nominations are this year. The only album that I really like from it is Primary Colours by The Horrors. The Independent, and as far as I can tell everyone else didn't listen to it but saw how they were in the NME and classed them as "land fill indie." Oh NME, your hype machine has become so transparent that it actively harms those it touches. It must be driven off with crosses and fire. Unlike The Horrors because there's this odd goth question mark hanging over them.

THE QUESTION OF THE HORRORS.

Are the Horrors Goths? No, stop saying it. I should not even be entertaining the notion. What The Horrors are is a project band. They're just very heavily conceptual, by which I don't mean in relation to the visual art idea of concept, but The Horrors have a thematic underpinning that is key to the music. They're about discord, disharmony, an element of chaos. The outfits, which aren't matching, they're just similar, are traditionally smart clothes that have that same discordant, slightly off, feeling to them. In the end the album is better becuase it owes debts to more interesting bands then the other nominies. My Bloody Valentine sticks out for me. Synthisis, reproduction, evolution.

I hate having dreams that you don't wake up from. I can tell the difference between wakefulness and sleep, don't worry. It's the way I get from one to the other that's the problem. When you wake up from a dream you have a clear dividing line between being in bed and being god knows where. What I find troubling is when the dividing line is stretched and spread out until well after breakfast.

Here is a poem. I might add to it later.

Little Gifts from Above

I keep the eggs of spiders in my hair

They vibrate with happiness

& smell sweetly of stagnant water

I keep them stuck with superglue strings

Like mother's silk

& must sleep standing up

So as not to accidentally

Crush

The eggs of spiders in my hair

& with every hatching clutch

I weep droplets of purple ink for

I know my children will soon crawl down my face

& kiss me goodbye

With the tips of their legs

& then no longer

Will anyone mention how

I am so pretty

With the eggs of spiders in my hair.

What darkness holds

There's a violence there, in a blank space. A passive aggressive sort of violence, but passive aggression can still hurt you. Blank space goads the viewer to filling it with something, anything, as long as it gets filled. There be dragons on any part of a map that would be otherwise blank. I think that the sea monsters were just doodles by bored cartographers to start with. The human mind abhors a vacuum so it pours into the vacuum that which it has most of: imagination. Fairies lived in the forest and the past (with the dead), places where people couldn't enter (at least not safely). Now they live in space and mutilate cows. When space becomes boring, and astronaut just a job, then where will the fairies go next? the net? You could look at Ghost in the Shell as a future folk tale.

I'm writing about fairies a lot. As always. I'm reading about them as well, which, again, is pretty standard. English ones, incidentally, not the Germanic or Scandinavian ones. One of the thing about our ones is that the idea of fairies being girly isn't knew. They relate to women's things, and they inhabit women's spaces: they do domestic things well or badly; they adore children and babies, although this isn't necessarily a good thing for children, quite the opposite really.

I'm reading Troublesome Things by Diane Purkiss and she certainly sees the female part of them, but she's also big into psychoanalytic explanations for stories. That's fine of course, I'm much less militant over Freud's methodological issues than I used to be; he may not have been a scientist but as a philosophical doctrine it's perfectly valid to look at thing that way. What Purkiss' interpretations fall apart, for me, is when is when she's talking about mouths. I can't remember an exact example, but say she gives an example tale where as soon as the mortal says some a the fairies name or their secret, giving away their knowledge of the fairies, then retribution hits and the moral is destroyed. Purkiss reads this and goes, right, mouth - open orifice - exposing the inside of the body - sexsexsexsex - here is the what it's all about. She talks so much about The Body as important (which it often is) that she misses the words. I think it's the speech that's important. The social function of fairies relies on the way they let people talk about things that they can't talk about: infanticide and incest are common things, and women have often been limited on what they can say, how they represent themselves.

I'm back to fairies being about women again, but they are. Maybe because men had more say in the church. It's harder and bigger and more solid. Right, that's unbelievably phallic, but what I mean is that with all the theology and exegesis Christianity is a very boy's way of looking at the world: how does it work? What does it look like when I take it apart? Exactly how many levels of Angels are there and in what order are they ranked?

I really what to read fairy stories from a hundred years in the future. I wonder, as genders change and melt into one another, who fairies will relate to?