15 YEARS OF LUCID FRENZY!

 Yes, 'twould seem Lucid Frenzy has hit its fifteenth anniversary. I thought about how to celebrate this momentous moment. Then thought that I'd write a post saying that Lucid Frenzy has hit its fifteenth anniversary. This is it, in fact.

Maybe come back to this blogging business in the Autumn...

REPORTS OF MY DEATH HAVE BEEN MILDLY EXAGGERATED

Not dead. Not even Marvel dead. But blogging here may be a bit more sporadic in coming weeks...

A VERY MERRY XMAS TO ALL OF OUR READER

NORMAL SERVICE SHOULD NOT BE ASSUMED...

Old computer now deaded. In the midst, I kid not, of my writing my most scintillating newest blog post. Replacement purloined, despite dent caused in pocket of public sector worker. Hence my ability to write these words. But now that post plus others imprisoned on old machine. (Don't ask me if it was backed up unless you want to see a grown man cry.) The lead they sold me to transfer data over doesn't fit one of the machines. To be precise, it doesn't fit the new machine they were selling me the very same time as the lead. Should those posts ever be liberated from their current captivity you'll be the first to know. In the meantime, here is some light music...

I’LL RAISE YOU A TENNER (LUCID FRENZY IS TEN)...

Yes, it seems the tenth anniversary of Lucid Frenzy has now been reached, with the pioneer post posted this very day in 2007. Happy birthday to… um… it.

The entire next decade is of course completely planned out in my head. More immediate aims include…. Well, the Autumn tis the season for gigs, gigs, gigs, so gig-going adventures may predominate for the next two to three months. There's also the matter of catching up on the visual arts reviews, over which I have fallen characteristically behind. They will probably take up the rest of this year even if I don’t go to any more exhibitions between now and then, which doesn’t sound likely. After which it could make a good time to get back on with that British science fiction business.

HAPPY KRAMPUS DAY TO ALL OUR READERS!

Stay good, kids...

“FOG AROUND PLANET - UNIVERSE CUT OFF” (aka MAPPING A VERY BRITISH TAKE ON THE FORGOTTEN FUTURE...)

Having looked hard at this blog and decided it wasn’t nearly nerdy nor provincial enough, for the impending seventh anniversary the chaps in charge here have decided to devote a new series to old British sci-fi.* Fellow Englanders! Let us journey back to those days when the chaps in charge knew how to do that stuff properly, before reliable old Airfix and bakelite had been supplanted by all that CGI and 3D tommyrot.

When you could rely on a raygun to look like a hairdryer and a spaceship like another hairdryer. When the Union Jack fluttered proudly atop heathen planets, boffins were running the show and sets were as wobbly as upper lips stiff. When, for their part, envious aliens ceaslessly plotted to invade the Earth, with particular interest in the strategically important location of Chipping Sodbury.

The cheaper the effects, the more cardboard the costumes, the more black-and-white the... uh... black-and-white the better. Not emotionally constipated about everything bar football and Royalty? You are most likely a colonial. Please change channels now.

After a ribbon-cutting ceremony involving Jenna from 'Blake's Seven' (subject to availability), proceedings will commence with Nigel Kneale’s pioneering ’Quatermass‘ series. To be shortly followed by a wheezing, groaning noise. From there, who can say? Does anybody here stll remember 'Star Maidens'? If so, don't worry, there are treatments...

And for those who don't know the in-joke in the title...

* Yes, I am using the term ‘sci-fi’ to try and wind up 'proper' fans...

BACK SOONISHLY...

FOUR HUNDRED STRONG! (AKA NOTORIOUSLY TARDY BLOGGER MAKES STILL-MORE-SHAMELESS APPEAL FOR AUDIENCE INDULGENCE)

Someone or other may even be impressed that this is my four hundredth post! And what better opportunity to sketch out a few plans for the near future? (Thoigh 'aspirations' may be a better term there...)

For one reason and another, I have managed to get terribly behind in my visual art reviews, to the point where I haven't managed one since May. This hasn't stopped me going to art exhibitions, surprise surprise, and the consequent mismatch has somewhat inevitably resulted in something of a backlog.

Generally, I find my visual art posts the most challenging and time-consuming, which is doubtless one of the reasons for the hold-up. But I also find them among the most enjoyable things I write. So with advance apologies for the even greater lapses into lateness that will come, I'm going to spend the next few months concentraiting on catching up.

As everything is so hopelessly late anyway, I won't be working through them chronologically. Instead I'll try batching them into some kind of thematic order. This will enhance reader enjoyment. (In my own mind.) These may or may not include Impressionism and Realism, Dada and British Pop Art, city art, Bauhaus and Surrealism, art of the First World War and adorable little portraits of kittens in a basket. (I may have made some of those up.) Plus other stuff...

But first...

SO LAST YEAR

New Year is of course a time to reflect and take stock. Which for me normally means totting up everything I've got behind on here. Frankly the picture is worse than ever, but I will try to catch up over the next couple of months. Mostly visual arts posts, which take the longest to write. But initially the catch-up over gigs will continue. (Which is the one thing I'm normally most on top of. That pesky fiftieth anniversary of 'Doctor Who'!) If, on that basis, you don't feel like checking back here for the next while, I don't suppose anybody would blame you.

If I don’t seem to have covered films much this year, that’s because I haven't seen them much either. This has been the official year of the missed film. Which is probably less to do with losing interest, and more to do with repeatedly coming home from work completely knackered.

Films I should doubtless have written something enthusiastic about include ‘The Spirit of 45’, ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’, ‘The World’s End’, ‘Prisoners’, ‘The Selfish Giant’ and ‘Gravity’. To my shame, I also failed to cover Cine-City’s welcome and fulsome Jan Svankmajer retrospective 'The Inner Life of Objects'. Alas, all I managed was some comments on 'Conspirators of Pleasure' over at 'I Munch Movies'. (Who generally did the thorough job I didn't.)

If pressed, I’d give a slightly softer thumbs-up to ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ and ‘The Wolverine’. (Though it galls me to type that bolt-on pronoun. When was he ever called that in the comics? And are ‘Casper the Friendly Ghost’ and ‘Muffin the Mule’ also now supposed to be the mature and sophisticated?)

‘Man of Steel’ and ‘The Desolation of Smaug’ seemed to belong together as (respectively) a re-imagining and an adaptation completely uninterested in their source material. So gaining any enjoyment from either became predicated on ignoring what was actually promised on the film poster. 'Man of Steel' in particular seemed keen to throw out anything but the most formal elements of Superman.

It seems a further step down. For the last few years you haven't been able to make a film that wasn't made already in some other form. Now it seems you also need to ignore what’s been made already, in case it’s not contemporary enough. It’s the inevitable result of any feedback loop – degeneration of sound into noise.

BLOG HOLS

We're all going on a blogging holiday,
No more posting for a week or two.

MORE OF LESS (aka THIS BLOG OF LATE)

WARNING! This is not a proper post at all. There are possible only four or five people alive who will have any interest in what follows, which could be summarised as a statement of non-intent. It's a rumination not even on things I intend to catch up with here but on how often I plan to do them. (Or more accurately, how seldom.) I am not even sure that I would count as one of those people myself...

Regular readers (insert mandatory joke here) may have noticed that this blog does not exactly fit into the instant-hit, rapid-response world of the internet, where anything relating to the week before is treated as if it was a time capsule. In fact, it fits in about as well as a barge canal would if placed in the middle of the Monaco Grand Prix. Not only is it not “trending”, I'm not even sure what that word is supposed to mean.

For a film review you may well have to wait until the end of the year. Art show write-ups, on the other hand, aren't necessarily that timely. I make very well-intentioned efforts to keep track of all of this, in the pretence I will one day stumble upon a stash of time and catch up on everything.

So perhaps it's not all that surprising when my blog stats tell me that people are arriving here through googling the word “late”, and that a post entitled ”I’m Late!” is currently among my most-read items! Perhaps these folk are fans of tardiness, lovers of laggardness, foes of punctuality, who are looking for a nice non-timely report on something or other. Perhaps I should simply be giving them what they want, with entries like ’Beatles Rumoured to Split’, ‘Everything Still to Play For in the Hundred Years War’ and ’Could This Be It For the Cretaceous Era?’ Perhaps I should change the strap-line in order to attract this new audience, 'For Those Who Find the Out-of-Date Great' or something similar.

Except I don't really want to do that. But neither do I particularly desire to lead a life of work, blog and sleep. I cannot remember, for example, the last time I brought out a comic. For that matter, and for the shame of it I'm not even entirely sure of the last time I read a book. Except that it was probably related to something I was writing here.

But mostly I'm keen to resist the lure of the internet, that seems to get seemingly sensible people all trigger-happy with that 'Send' button. I have already posted things I wish I'd thought over for longer, have definitely sent over-hasty and wrong-headed mailing comments in the past and wouldn't want to slip down that slope any further. This may be the information superhighway, but the highway is not my way.

So in a nutshell my solution to lateness in 2013 is to stop worrying about it. It's the art show write-ups which tend to take the longest to write, and perhaps by consequence become the most stockpiled. Expect them to filter gradually through. Expect some to breach new frontiers in exponential lateness. Expect me to not even be sorry. Except anything so long that it's not a full-length post each and every week.

The two or three people who may remember me volunteering to review my Top Fifty albums (at the last count, forty-eight to go)... well, I'm still working on it. The precisely-one-person who remembers me offering to write about the original 'Doctor Who', I haven't forgotten about that one either. (In fact, given the loss of interest I've had lately in 'New Who', that one may even get accellerated a smidge.)

In short, watch this space.

Which will fairly often be a space.

THE TWO PILLARS OF LUCID FRENZY (aka KEEPING MY FOOL MOUTH OPEN THESE PAST FIVE YEARS)

Today, good reader, is our fifth birthday! Yes it's five years to the day since the first ever 'Lucid Frenzy' entry was posted, a look at the first 'Quatermass Xperiment' film. Of course it's been nine years since things actually began, as an old-school photocopied fanzine handed out to all and sundry. (Well, not to all but there was the odd bit of sundry.) And it's nigh-on thirty years since I first started contributing to comics fanzines.

But that just makes me feel old, so let's focus on the most recent anniversary and celebrate by outlining the two pillars of Lucid Frenzy.

Now Islam, needless to say, has marshalled five pillars to its name. But that’s a global religion steeped in ancient wisdom. Here at Lucid Frenzy we’re more of a budget enterprise, and the most we can muster is two. In a half-hearted attempt to atone for this, each comes with an accompanying illustration. (Actually, one’s a video.)

Of course these may have differed if one of the other mooted names for this blog had come to pass; which included Double Negative, Sympathetic Magic, The Iconoclastic Fury, To Encourage the Others, A Hotbed of Baboonery, Crash Course, Hurly Burly, Dirty Looks and Early Closing Wednesday. (Dirty Looks would have at least upped the Google hits. And I do still intend to one day open a web shop for my comics which closes early on a Wednesday.)

1. A Lucid Frenzy

“Although rationality is a marvelous tool, it has its limits. Sometimes intuition can yield equally powerful and impressive results. But the title suggests having fun.”

Alan Moore on naming ‘Dodgem Logic’

Though I borrowed this blog’s name from a surrealist term it’s perhaps best illustrated by a Diego Riviera linocut, ‘The Communicating Vessels’ (1938, above), which doesn’t use the term at all! His aim was to illustrate Breton’s description of the relationship between dream and wakefulness not as opposite states but as an interaction, a perpetual interplay, like the ebb and flow of a fluid between two containers.

I’m attracted to this concept because it does precisely what Surrealism often didn’t do. Observing that the “bourgeois culture” of its era fetishised consciousness and feared the Freudian id, it attempted to turn all that upside down. Yet just to take up a parallel fetishisism, merely of the unconscious, was always heading for a fall. The common observation that surrealist imagery now fills adverts has its moment of truth here. We’re now told our dreams and desires can be fulfilled if we start buying shit.

Not only does Riviera’s image seem to me to be a more desirable state of affairs, it’s also a better description of how the act of creation works. The intuitive and puzzle-solving aspects of the brain have to work in an alliance. If they do then the result, both lucid and frenzied, will always be more than the sum of its parts.

Furthermore, there’s a tendency to assume critical writing merely applies some post-hoc analytical thinking to the original moment of artistic insight. The artist leaps boldly off into pastures new, then the critic follows while delineating the map. This seems to me to make pretty much the same error as above. The vessels communicate in your own head, which then ebb and flow into the original artwork and back. By making you see the artwork in a different light, the critic has effectively rewritten that work. As music writer Simon Reynolds has argued:

“Theory seemed to provide genuine illumination into qualities and powers possessed by the music. But beyond that the combination of the ideas and the music had a potentiation effect, to use the pharmacological term for when two drugs synergize to create a fiercer buzz.”

(Actually, after titling this blog, I realised that the Surrealists hadn’t used the term much at all! If you google it you mostly get references to here. The few other hits sometimes use it to mean what I mean, but more often take it as a general statement of exhilaration. Pretty rarely is it ever quoted from or referred back to the Surrealists!)

2. I’ve Started, I’ll Never Finish

“The further I go the less I know,

One foot goes in front of the other...”

As well as the clip above showing one of my favourite Fugazi songs (given a particularly fine performance), in my more self-aggrandising moments I like to imagine it’s this blog’s school song. (Of course my personal theme song is the Soft Boys' 'I Want To Be an Anglepoise Lamp', but there I digress.) Now I may have been at this sort of thing some while now, but I am as nothing compared to song author Ian MacKaye. He’s the very inverse of the trajectory Jello Biafra acidly described as “harder core than thou for a year or two, then it’s time to get a real job”. He's played his own style of punk his way since 1979 (when he was but seventeen). But I can’t see MacKaye writing a song to brag, so I don’t think that’s the nub of the issue here...

The song’s based around the double vision required of a long distance runner. Picturing the whole length of the course is just going to crush your resolve, so you make your mission something in sight - to get to the next hill. But there’s no use sprinting there, you set your sights on the next horizon but you run as though you’ll be doing it forever.

The key line is “there is not a fixed position.” Don’t ever expect to get to the end of this. There’s no point where everything has been said and the subject can be closed. And that's not just true because new people see the artwork and spin more lines from it, or new artworks are created which shine the old in a different light. It would be equally true if there was no further input, if people stopped making new artworks tomorrow. Art is like one of those magic wells or bottomless glasses of folklore, which can never be emptied, which always somehow renews.

In the above I’ve attempted a kind of brief explanation of a Riviera linocut and a Fugazi song. But of course those are only limited explanations, single perspectives. Someone reading them might even find them valuable, but at most they’re the next hill, never the finish of the race. And the same would be true if we got Riviera in to explain his linocut, or Mackaye his song. All knowledge, all insight, is only ever provisional.

As Paul Éluard (back to the surrealists) said: “There cannot be total revolution but only permanent revolution. Like love, it is the fundamental joy of life.”

Coming soon! Believe it or not, another anniversary...

LUCID FRENZY IN DIGEST FORMAT!!! (AGAIN...)

It's that time of year again when I take a few of my favourite pieces here and compile them into a print digest format, which you can then pick up and read just like we did in the old days, pa. These are put together by a team of top-notch graphic designers then compiled using the latest cutting-edge laser technology, and anyone who saw me at the copier in my local shop just now... that's purely a co-incidence, honest!

These worth... I mean priceless items will be available for public perusal at tomorrow's Alternative Press Fair, the impending alt-comics convention Caption, Comics Friends United and possibly even other places.

(I first started doing these as calling-cards for the blog, but as far as I can figure out there seems to be little or no audience overlap, like print and pixel are just two different channels. But I keep doing them out of some inner peversity.)

...all of which seems as good a time as any to remind ourselves of the tag-lines used for the original Olde Printe Versions of 'Lucid Frenzy'...

“The world's not impersonal perzine”

“Despite popular demand!”

“Too young to live! Too dull to die!”

“Raising the bar on lowering the tone for... oh, about a year or so now.”

“Not dead! Just not smelling too good!”

“Too damn stupid to know when to lie down and die!”

“It's back! And it's baaaaaaad! (The term “bad” is not used here in the “wicked” sense.)”

“Make way for more age without wisdom...”

“Nine instances of neither use nor ornament!”

“Never knowingly understood.”

...finishing on my personal favourite...

“Who will stem this flow of ill-informed outpourings from the pen of the stalk that walks?”

Incidentally there is no point asking for copies of the original print 'Lucid Frenzy.' Not because I don't have any left. There's just no point...

Coming soon! Some new stuff, honest!

HAYLP!!!

Only bother reading the rest of this if you are one of those clever techy types...
"Okay, I finally accepted my decrepit old computer wasn't about to spring back into life, so went out and bought a new iMac. Assuming my bank manager isn't reading this post, so far to the good. It starts up when it's supposed to (a big advantage over it's predecessor) and I can indulge in long-forgotten habits like watch the iPlayer and listen to Spotify. I'm facing two fairly big problems, however, and if anyone reading this has any advice I'd be grateful.


Firstly, pretty much all my old software has been rendered useless at a stroke - as it's incompatible with the new machine. (Presumably since Macs started using Intel processors.) Following advice from Mr. Google, I downloaded the shareware Open Office, which works pretty much the way I hoped it would. It does about everything Microsoft Word did, except you don't have to make Bill Gates richer for using it. It even happily supports the password-protected files I had. (TextEdit was just shrugging at those and walking off.) It does some distracting predictive texting thing, but I'd guess there's a way to switch that off. 


I also downloaded the Photoshop alternative Gimpshop, and things there ran less smoothly... This claims it needs something called X11 to open, which does indeed seem to strike up when bidden. But from there nothing happens! I simply stare nonplussed at an empty screen which sits where I hoped my new software might be. As I know nothing of this 'X11' business (unless it's a very late 'X-Men' sequel) I am now at something of a loss. Is there a way to get it going? Or alternative shareware I could try?


I'm also going to need some alternative to Quark/InDesign and (ideally) Illustrator for the next time I bring out a comic, so I'd gratefully receive any advice over those.


Secondly, I had a pile of stuff (including most of my half-completed Lucid Frenzy postings) saved on Zip discs. And (you've guessed it!) the new machine won't accept the software to install the drive. Probably more a question for Brighton-area folks, but if anyone has a PowerMac I could borrow for an hour or two so I can switch the data to CD I would be a very grateful man. I still have my drive and the installation software, so all I'd need is access to the machine.

FOUR TODAY!

Believe it or not, but Lucid Frenzy the blogsite clocks up four years as of today. However, Ye Olde Paper Days date back to Feb '03, so really we're seven and a half! And what better way to celebrate the world of inks and folds and paper-cuts than this video from Salford Zine Library? It even utters those immortal words "here's one I made earlier!"

THE LENS OF LUCID FRENZY IN LONDON!

For one reason or another, it has been an age since I uploaded any photos to Flickr. Check out some taken in London, at the London Zine Symposium, around the Barbican and of graffiti (samples below). Expect to follow shortly - stuff from Brighton (especially Brighton Festival), Bexhill and... um... more London.

I'M LATE! I'M LATE!

...okay, what else is new?

There's simply been too much good stuff going on lately for me to catch up with it all! This tends to happen this time of year with the Brighton Festival, but I've also been to a couple of other cool things in London I'd love to post about. (Just as soon as they invent more hours in the day...)

Of course this also means that when I'm finally able to write about it then it'll be late. But then you're surely used to that round here!