Iran, or We Fucking Told You So

What follows is some incoherent thoughts about the war in Iran and why we're all in Hell:

1. George W Bush must be laughing himself to sleep every night, and Dick Cheney must be laughing down in the fires of Dante's Ninth Circle, at the thought that no matter how stupid, mendacious and ill-prepared their invasion of Iraq was, the Trump Administration is doing it so much worse and making them look like FDR and Alan Dulles by comparison
2. I'm not the first or most eloquent person to make this observation, but the Venezuela thing is what cooked us, because it went off without any hitches for the Trump people, and so now they think doing the same thing to Iran will be just as easy
3. My nearest gas price has gone up to $5.09 per gallon, as opposed to $4.49 per gallon before last week. We need stickers on every pump of Trump pointing and saying "I did this!" Like those Biden stickers, but honest, given that the high gas prices that happened during Biden's term were a result of Trump going to the Middle East and telling them to ramp down production to raise prices
4. Though some of this is to be blamed on Biden, because he could (maybe?) have shut the war in Gaza down, but instead gave Netanyahu carte blanche and now we're riding our bombs down, Dr Strangelove-style, alongside the Israelis
5. I haven't checked my stock portfolio but I'm guessing that all this geopolitical risk is making my retirement accounts crater, which is meaningless for right now, but would mark the first time since I lost my job (almost exactly a year ago) that my net worth has gone down. I say meaningless, but since I'll probably have to start selling off my investments to keep myself going until I find a job, it'd be nice to have a portfolio that lasts me more than a week
6. There's a lot to be said about a person with a drinking problem and no actual leadership experience running the Pentagon and talking about "missions from God" and "triggering Armageddon"
7. How much cultural heritage has been destroyed because of this war and the one in Iraq, plus the Syrian civil war that just "ended" and everything else? It's relatively unimportant in the face of civilian deaths, infrastructure collapse and everything, but also... the Middle East is one of the oldest centers of civilization in the world, which means there's a lot of priceless history being bombed to dust right now
8. Just saying, the Iraq War gave us ISIS/Daesh, so what's this war going to throw up that we'll spend the next two decades dealing with?
9. Please spare me your bad-faith arguments that we're liberating the women of Iran from oppression: on one hand, an Iranian woman with a degree in medical technology once told me that her classes back in Tehran were easily half female; on the other hand, the US is steadily rolling back abortion rights and access to contraceptives is constantly being debated as getting cut next, plus a bunch of "thinkers" near and dear to the administration keep complaining about American women being allowed to vote
10. They probably need to cancel the Men's World Cup this year
11. On a related note, what does this war mean for Trump's chances to win next year's FIFA Peace Prize? Or will FIFA president Gianni Infantino give him two peace prizes?
12. Trump is a bad president: incompetent, intellectually lazy, dishonest, gross, uninformed about the world, uninterested in what effects his decisions will have on the world. He's also the most influential president of my lifetime, in terms of how much he's been able to push through
13. What would it take for someone like Maine Senator Susan Collins to stand up to him on literally anything, at this point? I ask because if the Democrats retake both House and Senate in November and impeach Trump, there's still no way to get enough senators to convict. And even if they did, we'd end up with President JD Vance, who'd just pardon Trump anyway
14. Fuck

RIP Dan Simmons

Sci-fi and fantasy and horror and everything else author Dan Simmons passed away this week, and I've been seeing a lot of people on social media talking about his works that had an effect on them. One or two have mentioned his drift rightwards, but most focused on his Hyperion Cantos, which are the books that put him on the map for me.

I first encountered the series in the pages of Bonelli's Almanacco della Fantascienza, a yearly digest they did around their SF character Nathan Never (Dylan Dog had a horror almanac and Martin Mystere had a mystery almanac), which included articles about notable books and movies and other stuff of interest to Italian science fiction readers. One year the almanac mentioned the Fall of Hyperion, the second in the series, but when I picked it up (in English) I was confused by everything and didn't go back to the series for a while.

When I did, I started with the first book, Hyperion, which became one of my foundational texts as a science fiction reader, up there with Foundation and 2001 and Dune and the Hitchhiker's Guide. I even wrote a blog more than ten years ago about how good the first paragraph is at setting the scene and introducing the themes that float throughout the entire series. The cover of Hyperion is so distinctive that I notice it whenever I see it on someone's shelves, for example in some of Sal Khan's videos on Khan Academy.

Hyperion blew my mind when I finally read it, and Fall of Hyperion did it again when I was ready for it. Endymion and Rise of Endymion broke my heart when I got to those. Most of the discussions of the Hyperion Cantos I've read this week indicate that the last two books weren't as well-received as the first, but I remember them being great, and I remember my dad loved them too. In any case, the Hyperion Cantos overall had enough of an effect on me that I went out and read the book by Teilhard de Chardin, whose philosophy plays such an important part in the story (less of a foundational text for me, but then, I've never really grokked philosophy).

After those books, I was ready to follow Dan Simmons anywhere, and was excited to pick up Ilium. Some of it felt derivative of the Hyperion books, but it had a similar mix of philosophical and literary DNA powering it, and I frequently think about Simmons's portrayal of the Homeric Greeks. Unfortunately Olympos wasn't as successful, in part because by then Simmons had been radicalized by 9/11 - his depiction of the modern world ending because of an Islamist plot felt thin even in 2005 or 2006, or whenever I read it.

It then seemed he'd gone even further down that rabbit hole, when I read a passage from a newer book of his that seemed to imply that Texas was free because they paid full price for healthcare. I'll admit that put me off reading any of his stuff after Olympos, just like Orson Scott Card's increasingly unhinged rants did (at around the same time).

I didn't only read Simmons's books. As I mentioned in my previous blog about him, I spent a lot of time in the 2000s reading his Writing Well columns, now sadly unavailable because his website is no longer up. He did a good job in those columns of deconstructing the craft of writing, and while some of the advice hasn't served me as well as I'd have liked, I still live by his maxim, taken from F Scott Fitzgerald, that you should read at least six top-flight authors every year. I've managed it every year since I moved back to California, and in that time I've also read six non-male SFF authors, in the same spirit, i.e. to broaden my horizons.

While I'm less interested in Dan Simmons's political screeds, I've been thinking it would be nice to revisit the Hyperion books, and to go back to some of his earlier horror books, which seem to evoke the same spirit as early Stephen King and Ray Bradbury. I've heard good things about those, too, so here's hoping.

And even apart from that, I'll always have those indelible images from the Hyperion books he painted: the Consul in his spaceship at the start, the story of Sal and Rachel Weintraub, the world tree ships, and so much more.

Finally Getting to Grips With Avengers Vs X-Men

Spent the last week or so reading the 2012 crossover event that pitted Marvel's two biggest teams against each other, and that heralded a big change in the status quo for the X-Men in particular (I'm assuming, though I haven't read the Avengers books from around that period). I've read that it wasn't universally loved as a story, and I kind of have to agree, since it feels like a number of characters have to act weird for it to work.

Before I get to that, I wanted to consider that statement, that the Avengers and the X-Men are Marvel's two biggest teams. I'm old enough to remember when the X-Men really were Marvel's biggest property, and when nobody really cared about the X-Men, so that feels weird to say. But by then, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had started in earnest, and the crossover came amid the first Avengers movie, which was a big success and seemed to live up to expectations, at least in terms of forming a template for later MCU phases. To put it another way, the Avengers were on the upswing, finally living up to their billing as a top team and pulling in decent sales (I presume).

The X-Men could be said to have been on the opposite trajectory: their most influential writer, Chris Claremont, was long gone from the books (and crucially, from setting the tone editorially) by 2012, despite a couple of returns in the previous decade or so. The two most innovative runs, Grant Morrison's New X-Men and Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men, were over by then too, leaving the mutants in the hands of writers who weren't worse, necessarily, but whose runs don't seem to have captured the imagination of fans as much. I didn't like Peter Milligan's run, for example, while Mike Carey's was good but maybe not as spectacular as I'd have liked. Same with Matt Fraction and Kieron Gillen's respective runs, though both have a lot to recommend them (apart from when the art was done by Greg Land).

The premise of the story felt like it came out of nowhere, a bit: without much foreshadowing, the Phoenix Force is headed toward Earth, and its presumed new host, Hope Summers, the mutant messiah. The Avengers want to stop the Phoenix, given that it eats planets, while the X-Men, against their history, see it as a force of rebirth for the mutant population, which had been cut down to 198 after the House of M crossover. I thought Cyclops's position was particularly strange, since the two previous Phoenix encounters, the early 80s Phoenix Saga and 2004's Planet X storyline, both ended in the death of his girlfriend-then-wife, Jean Grey (she got better in 1986, died in 2004, and got better again in 2018 or so).

On the other hand, given that the Avengers line had expanded to a bunch of new books and teams, it was nice to see how the rest of the Marvel universe reacted to these events. A storyline that I really found intriguing was the Phoenix's ties to Iron Fist's history, since a previous Iron Fist had fought the Phoenix off with the help of Leonardo da Vinci (but of course!). I also quite liked the storyline in Avengers Academy, the book focused on younger heroes, like Wolverine's clone/daughter X-23, in which the younger mutants from the X-Books were held at the Avengers Academy and the two groups debated their own agency. That may have been the most interesting philosophical debate in the entire crossover, given that it hinged on X-23's own experience of being controlled and manipulated by adults.

Not that it was always easy to follow the storyline across the various books. Marvel Unlimited is usually good at gathering these crossovers into reading lists and funneling you through the story, issue by issue, but this crossover was an exception. The reading list put the VS miniseries first, which was focused on individual fights without regard to the overall plot, then the main AVX miniseries came next, and after that the tie-ins that ran in individual series. That would have meant reading the main storyline in the AVX miniseries, then going back to the beginning with the first of the tie-ins, which made it a little more confusing than it should have been. At any rate, there was a lot of going back and forth in time, so it wasn't always clear where a given issue fit in the narrative.

The other thing that came to mind as I read through the crossover was how interesting it would be for one or more MCU phases to focus on this storyline, or something similar. The X-Men are meant to be joining the MCU in the next couple of movies, Doomsday and Secret Wars, which means there could be a big fight between them eventually. I found myself wondering as I read how Marvel might go about it, but it's probably too convoluted and pie-in-the-sky, and would probably be unfair to the X-characters, since they'd have a lot less backstory to make you root for them.

On another note, an MCU version of AVX would probably turn the Scarlet Witch into the villain again, since the whole thing came from her whispering "No more mutants" and depowering them all, which led to this situation. I feel like she's been through enough.

Still, it's a fascinating artifact from the previous decade, when Marvel was on its way to becoming the entertainment juggernaut that we now know it as, and I feel like it has the epic sweep that could be fun as the big crossover movie that caps a few years of individual movies. Though I worry it would turn into a character assassination of Cyclops, featuring him taking on the Phoenix Force and almost destroying the world. He's a favorite character, so I don't like to see him done dirty this way.

In any case, I'm excited to see how the next phase of X-Men comics plays out - I've already read a few of those books, but not in an organized way, so putting them all into context will be like reading them anew. And I'm interested in eventually getting back to AVX via the Avengers books, which should provide a different perspective.

As I said, I don't think it was always fully successful, and it made the X-Men overall look bad, but I have to give Marvel points for ambition. It was developed by all the big Marvel writers of the time, including Brian Michael Bendis and Jonathan Hickman, who went on to be so influential in later X-books, so it's also neat to see their first work on these characters.

Thoughts on that Jim Ratcliffe Thing

Just a quick one, because enough ink has been spilled about Sir Jim Ratcliffe's comments about immigrants. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the guy who supports Brexit and moves his business abroad to avoid paying UK taxes, then comes in and cuts a bunch of positions at Manchester United that don't have much impact on the bottom line (your tea ladies and so on), turns around and mouths off in pretty gross and innumerate ways about how immigration is affecting the UK.

But it's still dispiriting, especially when football likes to present itself as this bastion of equality and meritocracy, where everyone is welcome. And his non-apology was pretty gross - it's not that people chose to be offended, but that he said things that are offensive, not true, and that only lead to more violence. 

He claims that the UK population has grown by 12 million people since 2020, which actual UK statistics don't back up (they say it's 3 million). Referring to this number - whether 3 million or 12 million - as "colonization" is pretty clearly inviting irresponsible people to do irresponsible things, when the UK desperately needs immigrants to come in and work for the NHS and for care services for older folks and children.

Or does Ratcliffe think these roles can be filled exclusively by the UK's existing 70 million residents? Or only by white people? You wonder what Ratcliffe knows about how normal people are being impacted if he has so much money that he can insulate himself from daily life in the UK.

I read the Guardian pretty much every day, and I have to say I fear for the UK more and more. They seem ready to bring in Reform UK, which promises to do all the shit Trump and his cronies are doing over here, but in a more cack-handed way. The idea that Ratcliffe is in favor of that, because it'll reduce his tax load and cut the regulations that keep him from destroying the environment and the social fabric is even more infuriating. But he's providing ever more evidence that billionaires are less job-providers and more drains on society - maybe it's people like him that need to be stopped from colonizing our societies.

Thoughts on Wonder Man

I just finished Wonder Man on Disney Plus, and I think it was pretty great. I wasn't expecting to be so captivated by it - I wasn't even really planning on watching it right now, but decided to check it out earlier this week, just to see how it was. And, to be honest, to give it kind of a pity-watch - I expected the bad-faith review-bombers to get to work on it, since it changes the lead from a white guy in the comics to a Black guy.

But I took to it immediately, in part because the episodes were short - only about half an hour each, growing to about 35 minutes toward the end. But also in part because of the two leads: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is great as Simon Williams/Wonder Man, and Ben Kingsley reprises his role as Trevor Slattery/the Mandarin from Iron Man 3 and Shang-Chi. Abdul-Mateen commands the attention in the lead role, especially when Acting. Meanwhile, Kingsley's portrayal of Trevor grows better and more layered every time we see him, with this show casting him first as Simon's friend and then (early on) revealing that he's got his own agenda.

In between we get a lot of enjoyable business about what it's like to be a jobbing actor in Hollywood, contrasting Simon being at the beginning of his career and Trevor being, if not at the end, certainly defined by his most notorious role as the Mandarin. As a creative person myself, it was particularly enjoyable to watch them navigate that life, even toward the end, where they find themselves in a different headspace than at the start.

As far as the changes to the character of Wonder Man himself, I've already referred to the change of ethnicity - though it's interesting that they gave Simon a Haitian background. The other big change is that, instead of getting his powers through some energy nonsense, as in the comics, their origin is just... unexplained. There's some suggestion that he's always had them, or that they emerged during puberty, which would imply that he's a mutant, which Marvel's been seeding through the movies and shows for a while (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Ms Marvel, Deadpool & Wolverine and the Marvels all refer to mutants in some capacity).

But this show isn't about superheroes or their origins. It's about getting out of your own way to reach your goals, and about how you lift yourself up by connecting with others, rather than focusing constantly on yourself. This eventually becomes... literal? You'll know what I mean if you've watched the last scene.

The important thing is that Wonder Man doesn't do the usual superhero pyrotechnics (even if most of the best MCU shows, like WandaVision and Loki, also didn't), preferring instead to tell a character-based story. I've seen some reviews suggesting it might even be Marvel's best show? I don't know if I'd go that far, as WandaVision (and yes, Loki, just to mention both again) were probably richer overall, but as I said, I watched it just to see what it was like, and ended up bingeing it in half a week.

I don't know if we'll get to see Simon (or Trevor) again, but I hope so. He's not a huge character (one of the reasons why I was a little reluctant to start the show), but he's always been associated with the Avengers in some way, so it might be fun to see him pop up in Doomsday or Secret Wars. Or, while we're thinking pie-in-the-sky, an Avengers West Coast movie?

RIP Sal Buscema

Just read the news that comics artist Sal Buscema passed away last week at the age of 89. I might not have remarked on it, if I hadn't been revisiting some of his work in the last few weeks - I just wrapped up a long-awaited read-through of Walter Simonson's run on Thor from the 80s, the last half of which Buscema drew. Reading it, I was reminded of Buscema's classic style, which I recall from reading books like Spectacular Spider-Man back in the 90s.

As some of the posts I saw noted, Buscema was one of the last remaining creators who were present in the early years of what we now know as Marvel comics. In addition to his long run on Spectacular Spider-Man, he also drew the Incredible Hulk for ten years, and I'm sure I've come across his work elsewhere. He was also the younger brother of John Buscema, who's associated with formative runs of so many Marvel characters - but ironically, I feel like I've encountered more of Sal's work over the years.

The timing is sadly ironic, because his work on Thor reminded me what a good artist he was, and I found myself considering reading Spectacular Spider-Man just to see his run on the book - I'd even looked him up on Wikipedia a week or two ago to find out what else he'd done. I'll definitely read Spectacular Spidey now - and looking again at his body of work, it looks like I have extensive runs on Daredevil and the Avengers, among others, to look forward to.

My condolences to his family and coworkers, and all the fans - it's sad to see one of the old pros go.

Blue Lights May Be My New Favorite Brit-Cop Show

I just finished Series 3 of Blue Lights, and wow, wow, wow.

It wasn't even on my radar until fairly recently. I'd watched the first series of Line of Duty a couple of years ago on Hulu, and then wasn't able to get back to it until last year, when I knocked out Series 2 through 4 in short order and Series 5 when I got to the UK last July. When I discovered that Hulu here didn't have Series 6, I started considering taking a subscription to BritBox, reasoning that paying $11 to watch a full season of a show is completely fair.

Then at some point I read about Blue Lights, and was intrigued. So when I finally found the time to subscribe to BritBox (back in November, when it was offering two months for $6 rather than the usual $11), I finished Line of Duty and then went looking for Blue Lights. And I was hooked from the start.

The best I can say about it is that it's like the UK's version of the Wire, which is my absolute favorite TV show ever. It starts with following the cops, but expands to spend more time following the criminals as well, with investigations that expand from the first series through to the third. However, like the Wire, it's as much a profile of a city as it is a police procedural.

Series 2 expands from Series 1's investigation of a former Republican turned gang leader to look not only at the loyalist gangs of Belfast, but also the effects that the post-pandemic cost-of-living crisis, plus a decade and a half of Tory austerity, have had on the city's neighborhoods. The first image of Series 2 has two of the protagonists answering a call about a homeless man's overdose death - and it soon becomes clear that he was killed both by the drugs sold by the ongoing antagonists and by society's indifference and powerlessness in response to the ongoing and overlapping crises.

Series 3 is a little weaker in some ways, but still compelling TV. It's meant to look at how criminality has infected the higher levels of society, but I didn't feel like it delved into those characters' inner worlds as well as the first two seasons did with the Republican and Loyalist neighborhoods. In part that's because they're engaged in varying levels of child exploitation and abuse, which makes it pretty impossible to make them someone you want to watch, let alone root for. But none of the villains in Series 3 are as good as Series 2's main antagonist Lee Thompson, who's at once clearly a criminal but also disposed to see himself as a key part of his community.

That said, the final episode has a nice sting in the tail when Series 1's Tina McIntyre faces the Dublin gangsters she's been propping up since her husband and son went to prison. I don't know if it sets anything up for Series 4, but it was a satisfying ending to the show so far.

All of this means that I'll now have two reasons to subscribe to BritBox again down the line - the BBC has commissioned Series 4 of Blue Lights and Series 7 of Line of Duty, so I'll be keeping an eye out for those. I've cancelled my subscription in the meantime to save a bit of cash and not feel like I have to watch yet another streamer regularly, but again, paying $11 for a month in which to watch a full season of either show, plus whatever other Brit-delights I can fit in (the Responder! Silent Witness! Wire in the Blood! Rebus! The New Statesman!), is completely worth it.

The bottom line, though, is that I can't recommend Blue Lights highly enough - even if you might need subtitles to cope with all the Belfast accents.