My Batman Birthday, the Doctor's Downfall, and Nostalgia

It's September 1989. A cold night. I know it is because I remember having to wear a jacket when I went out to play in the street with friends after watching an episode of Doctor Who. The Who serial this month is 'Battlefield', a story which mixes nuclear paranoia, Arthurian legend and the show's own peculiar brand of science fantasy and includes the revelation that at some point in his incredibly long life the Doctor is Merlin. I am still seeing the final cliffhanger frame of tonight's episode, the face of a terrifying alien/demon/BBC effects department triumph called The Destroyer in my head as I notice our street sign has been damaged, probably by a car, and absentmindedly kick it. 

I mean seriously, look at this dude

In my head I am recreating a frame from Frank Miller and David Mazuchelli's Batman: Year One, which I recently received as a birthday present due to my absolute obsession with Tim Burton's Batman adaptation of that year, but in the eyes of the elderly woman passing by I have clearly engaged in the wanton act of vandalism which has destroyed our respectable street sign, and I am harangued for my alleged crime until I decide I have had enough of her shit and go back inside. Maybe I should reread the new 2000AD so I can try and work out what the Hell is going on in Strontium Dog.: Simon Harrison's art looks cool but I have no idea what's going on. Or maybe I'll have a look through the HeroQuest quest book in anticipation of having the gang over tomorrow to run one of the scenarios. 

Twenty-eight years old, I was. 

Not really, obviously. I had in fact only just turned old enough to have seen the Burton Batman, the first film released in the UK under the new '12' certificate, and had in fact not yet been 12 when I'd seen the film that summer. It might seem a little quaint that there was concern that the events transpiring in Anton Furst's incredible Gotham City sets might be too frightening for young children, now that we're raising the first generation to have been exposed to those genuinely disturbing Elsa and Spider-Man YouTube vids, but you have to remember that Britain has always had a sizable contingent of people who worry about what's in children's media. These days those people endlessly moan online about things getting too 'woke' but in the nineties (and we are, here, in 1989, on the very cusp of the Long 90s - the Berlin Wall hasn't fallen yet, but it's teetering) they were convinced that a combination of latchkey parenting and Video Nasties was going to raise a generation of thugs. I know, right? I mean I don't know about you but I've hardly garrotted anyone, and I was definitely too young the first time I saw Robocop and Predator. Perhaps it was one of these video-addled superthugs the woman who freaked out at my display of Ninja martial arts thought she was confronting. 

Doctor Who itself had been mortally wounded by the human incarnation of this busybody tendency, Mary Whitehouse, before I had even been born, when the producer for what many consider the show's golden age, Philip Hinchcliffe, was sacked to appease the 'silent majority' (in fact, as those of us who've had to deal with terverts know only too well, a depressingly vocal minority) she supposedly represented after Whitehouse decided the nation's children had taken what would these days be called irreversible damage from seeing the Doctor apparently drowned at the end of the third instalment of the 1976 serial 'The Deadly Assassin'. Really, the Elizabeth Sandifer article linked here under the first mention of Whitehouse's name will tell you everything you need to know about that, but right now all you need to know is that 'Battlefield' came at the end of over a decade of Who stories being watched like a hawk for anything that would annoy the Whitehouse Brigade under subsequent producers. This baleful gaze was continuing to falter as culture grew decidedly more liberal (you'll have observed that all of Whitehouse's wrath couldn't stop my parents from letting me see Jesse Ventura call his mercenary chums 'a bunch of slack-jawed faggots' and advocate for the ability of chewing tobacco to turn men into charismatic megafauna) but it was a factor in the cancellation of the show, which would happen later that year. 

Mary Whitehouse thought kids were too stupid to realise Tom Baker is an actor and could hold his breath.

But why am I writing all this? Well, I've been thinking a lot about nostalgia lately, and engaging in a fair bit of it too - including a rewatch of the Hinchcliffe/Baker era. Nostalgia has a lot to do with grief - the earliest use of the word occurs in describing Swiss mercenaries pining for their home cantons during the many European wars of the 18th century. So it isn't surprising that in the wake of my mother's death I've turned backward in my viewing and reading of late, rewatching things (like the Jimmy McGovern/Paul Abbott-written ITV crime series Cracker, for example) that I haven't seen in years, looking at them almost for the first time and seeing how they hold up now. And, as part of my effort to just write more lately, it's reasonable to assume that - when I am not causing mischief in the Tory leadership election - I will be writing about some of these series, some of these books, some of these cultural artefacts I've been looking back at. And that will probably be here rather than on my Medium page because - as you will probably have worked out - I try to keep my Medium page for something close to the level of a published article and usually draft posts in Google Docs beforehand, whereas here I feel happier to take a more freeform approach of just starting somewhere and seeing where it takes me. 

It's July 2022. A hot day: record temperatures in parts of the country, which have already seen RAF Brize Norton suspend all flights because their runway's melted. Today I have had to tidy up my bathroom in preparation for a visit from my letting agents' maintenance man - a job I have been putting off, in my depression, for months but have been forced to do because the plug for my bathroom sink has unexpectedly jammed itself backwards halfway down the pipe and is refusing to emerge leaving me with, effectively, a bricked sink. Which I managed, largely because it was early enough when I started for the heat to be only oppressive rather than infernal, but it definitely left me deciding that it was the last physical thing I was doing today. Maintenance haven't turned up, so I guess I'm stuck waiting until they do. And while I wait I may as well watch 'The Robots of Death'. Though I do notice Jacob Geller has a new video about Zelda games up, so I might watch that first.  All of us, it seems, are taking a look at our pasts lately. 

I move like a sniper these days, and not in a good way

 

So earlier this week, I wrote a piece for my Medium account about playing Sniper Elite 5 when I learned that my mother had died.  In the process I draw a - perhaps somewhat stretched - analogy between the process of moving through maps in SE5 and the process of finding your way through Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief. But what I want to write about here is something else which occurred to me about the ways in which my life has come to resemble one of Karl Fairburne's peregrinations across enemy territory, and that's something I alluded to in my second Medium article this past week, which is otherwise mostly about genitals: my recently acquired disability. 

Here's how I described the process of maneuvering about in the Sniper Elite series: 

The first thing you’re going to want to do at the start of a level is crouch: the next thing is to look through your binoculars. You will spend way more time looking through these than through your rifle’s scope, because they allow you to tag opponents, vehicles and other salient features of the environment. Only then, when you’re satisfied no-one has line-of-sight on you, can you think about moving — and even then, most of that will be at a crouch if not a crawl, hugging the shadows, staying behind cover and creeping into tall grass at every opportunity. Move, stop, scan, and move again. And, when an enemy comes between you and one of the mission’s objectives, a fourth step: kill.

And as soon as I finished typing that, I thought: well, shit. With the exception of crouching down, hiding in tall grass, and killin' Nazis (though as I observed in the Medium piece, someday soon it might be our duty to try and fit as much Nazi-killing into our schedule as possible), that kinda sounds like the approach I've been forced to take when walking anywhere these days. Let me explain.

During the first lockdown, I came down with what I thought of, at the time, as the worst 'flu I'd had in my damn life, and which I now think was probably a mild case of COVID-19. And one of the reasons I suspect it of being that is what happened to me after I recovered from my illness: simply put, I get out of breath a lot more easily these days, to the extent that, after a brief attempt at mounting a post-covid comeback, I stopped going to the gym, and began taking walks instead. And then even the walks started getting harder, to the extent that I began using a cane, which helped mitigate pain in my lower back and hips (gettin' old, kids: as much as it might be preferable to the alternative, it still fucking sucks). And then I began to have to stop during walks to take rests. And I began having to take rests sooner, and sooner, and sooner. To the extent that I can now only walk a few yards before getting out of breath, and have to rest frequently in the course of walking anywhere. 

And, because, especially currently, I hate, and have always hated, having to acknowledge the infirmity of my own body instead of enjoying its capacity to exhilarate, I have developed a habit of walking back from places. Not always all the way: the other week, after I had been into Newcastle to take a look at the RMT picket at Central Station (great turnout, at least one cute doggo, lots of passing motorists honking in support) I decided to walk back from Central Station to my usual bus stop for civicentric excursions, near Old Eldon Square. Not much of a walk, but I had made a crucial mistake: the route I had decided to follow took me up Pink Lane and along the length of Clayton Street, a route which, for long sessions, offered nothing on which to sit except iron traffic bollards and, for one terrible, extended stretch, didn't even offer those. 

By the time I hobbled into Burger King, bought a drink I can only describe as some kind of dehydrated slush (would not recommend) and collapsed into a chair I felt like I'd ran a marathon. Students of Newcastle's urban geography will of course have realised that by this point I was nowhere near the end of my planned walk, though fortunately the remainder of the route offered more municipal benches and plenty of opportunities for rest. 

Such students will also notice this is nowhere on the route described, but I needed a picture here to break things up. 

So you see, like Karl Fairburne, I progress over terrain in slow fragments, pausing frequently, and always scanning. But I'm not scanning for gun-toting Nazis - actually no, scratch that, I am paranoid enough and have led the kind of life which means one does, in fact, scan for gun-toting Nazis, as well as feds, spies of various descriptions and certain entities which do not in the strictest interpretation of the word actually exist, but in recent times all of these have taken a back seat to park benches, low walls, wide steps, bollards and anywhere else a fat sick old dyke can park her arse. 

As the odyssey detailed above makes clear, one of the things this state of affairs has made me acutely conscious of is the paucity of these opportunities even in our city centres, especially if one doesn't want to pay for the privilege with the purchase of a coffee or other beverage. This quite simply must change. I don't say this only for myself: I am, after all, not the only person in this city, never mind this country, never mind our pandemically-imperilled planet, who is finding it harder to get around. It cannot be repeated enough that we have all just experienced a mass disabling event. There are a lot more of us these days who do not do as well with walking as we used to, and if we are going to participate fully in the public sphere, we are going to need somewhere to sit down. 

Otherwise, who knows? Some of us are going to have to lie down somewhere sometime, and reach out to our indolent legislators with what Jim Morrison once called injurious vision. And then, once we've domed those bastards, we can track down the shit who invented that horrific iced Fanta drink. And actually, while we're on the subject of Fanta...

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed this! If you did, and want to show your appreciation, I'm always grateful for tips to my ko-fi page if you can spare the bread. If not, shares and all that sort of thing are good too. Comments, you know what I mean, etc, though if you're an asshole you'll just get deleted so don't be an arsehole. This sign-off bit has gone on longer than I intended. Peace!

W6 9HA

 

Now then, now then guys and gals...don't those eyes look a little familiar?

I'm on the inside, looking in

on where I keep the me-in-me

and seeing someone else within.

Somebody I knew I might see:

I knew about the tracksuit and

what happened isn't news to me.

I knew about the consequences 

back when I first made the deal,

the same one he did: easy access

and deniability

in return for handing over 

that unfungibility 

that some will say we know from birth

and some will say we strive to be:

the signature, the fingerprint,

the you-in-you, the me-in-me.

We give it up so easily.

So I watch my sorority's 

photo opportunity 

give him the publicity

he hungers for eternally

anew. Adieu. To secrecy.

The Tracksuit

 

They keep it in a vitrine in a hidden room

on Matthew Parker Street. They burn

cigars before it daily, read his wishes in

the shuffle of recordings: TV, radio, his DJ

sets and interviews, his patter randomised,

things set out in his second, secret, will:

his wish to fuck the Baroness

post-mortem, for example. Take instruction 

from a ghost, Burke's partner literalised

in Hinton's neverending now. The ace

of shades who fixed it for them after

2010's dumb luck, who modelled how

to play at sainthood while alluding

to desires left unspoken. The man who

knew what gets the British going

is bacon rolls and doubletalk and stunts

and plastic flags, and creeping worship

of Britannia's corpse's cunt. 

Hale and Hearty?

 

The Leader’s healthy as the Land!

Just watch him running down this strand!

Don’t ask why the second shot

is just the first, recut

and zoomed as if to hide a lack of spoons,

or why, elsewhere, he sits in rooms

with empty eyes and shoulders sagging,

a new bug post a heavy fagging,

or why, upright, he grips the lectern

as maskless yanks clutch ivermectin:

just smile and watch him mangle Ovid,

and don’t suggest he has long covid.  

Trespasses for Texas

 Right.

This here is my novella, Incidents of Trespass. I self-published it via Amazon a few years ago and then, a few months after doing so, I read an article about Amazon's labour practices and delisted it as a futile act of protest.  Currently it only exists in the form of less than fifty hard copies which are currently cluttering up my flat. 

So. 

You may have seen the news coming out of Texas, where that state's excuse for a governor, Greg Abbott, has directed Child Protective Services to prosecute parents who provide their trans children with trans affirming care, and to remove said trans children into foster care. There are no two ways about this: this is state-sponsored child abuse on a massive scale. I have always said, and will continue to say until such time as I am silenced with extreme prejudice, that anti-trans bigots are largely motivated by a grotesque sexual pathology, in which they get off on abusing and exploiting women and children. They get a sick thrill from denying people bodily autonomy, forcing trans people to endure a traumatic puberty developing as the wrong gender, and then attacking our bodies in grotesque, sexualised ways for the scars they display as a result. We saw this demonstrated earlier today when it was revealed that anti-trans bigots had been sending sexually explicit images to the mother of Grace Lavery, as 'punishment' for her withdrawing from a debate with penis-obsessed weirdo Helen Staniland which was to be hosted by a website which frequently and approvingly platforms fascists. 

I call these people not TERFs (which they claim is a slur), but TERVERTS. Because these people do not have a political position. They have a paraphilia. And it happens that, among other things, one of the things Incidents of Trespass does is explore that paraphilia. 

So. 

If you can provide proof of having made a donation, of any amount, to any of the links below, I will send you one of the last surviving copies of Incidents of Trespass. Help me declutter my flat, get your hands on exclusive, ultra-rare AJ McKenna content AND help desperate trans people in the Lone Star State! If you make an especially big donation I might throw in some more stuff while I'm at it. 

The links: 

The Transgender Education Network of Texas: https://www.transtexas.org/ 

Transequality: Texas Action Centre: https://transequality.org/texasactioncenter 

Texas Trans Kids: https://www.txtranskids.org/

Central Texas Transgender Health Coalition: https://txtranshealth.org/

Trans Kids and Families of Texas: https://www.northtexasgivingday.org/transkidsandfamiliesoftexas

And finally, May Leitz, one of my favourite YouTube creators, who is currently trapped in Texas while trans and desperate to get out. I contribute to May's Patreon https://www.patreon.com/nyxfears but she also has a PayPal link for one-off donations which you can donate to: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/nyxfears 

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please donate, and do what you can to oppose this disgusting decision. 

A lens behind a mirror

St Francis of Assisi, and if the hangover

was all that would be bad enough. He

knows he's being recognised, he sees

the questions in their eyes, he hopes

he can disguise the way he's walking,

that he won't give himself away 

by flinching when he sits. He hopes

no-one took photos: knows that phones

were surrendered on entry, but also

knows Evgeny is the type to hide

a lens behind a mirror. Midnight Climax.

Kompromat. He must assume the photos.

Yet more dirt. Humiliation. His whole body

aching, joints especially. And arse,

of course. A different kind of pain there.

Thought he left all that behind with Fives.

And even then at least it was organic.

Rubber's new to him. Cold. How was he

to know? She was presented as a 

present. Well done, good and faithful, 

Ev knows what you like, B, time to shine

in use… Some of them knew. What he 

was in for. That she wasn't like the girls

he used to bully at the Speccy. 

They were laughing. Jeering. Cheered

her on. Threw things that hit him. 

Couldn't meet their eyes that morning.

Keeps his head down as he shows

his passport. Finds a corner. Closes 

eyes to hide from conversation. 

The whole room saw her fucking him.

That's just as bad as photos. 

People in Ev's line do not forget.