The Red House

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. This week’s letter is a bit of a placeholder, but stick with me while I finish my renovations and blow out the cobwebs here, please. I’m putting up new paint and changing the furniture.

In this letter:

• Comics are the ghost train

• notes on THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT episode 4

• sound and vision

OPERATIONS

COMICS ARE THE GHOST TRAIN

I like trains. I like sitting by the window, the big windowframe of British trains, the glass panel that frames the outside world. Sometimes the train is still and another train clatters past, and my panel becomes a panel from “Master Race,” the short comic written by Al Feldstein and legendary for its illustration by Bernard Krigstein. One of the many effects in that eight-page comic that had never been seen before included a view of a slowing train, the motion communicated by slicing and repeating the view of people behind the train’s window glass, a convincing evocation of the experience in a static medium. A panel about a panel containing strobing strips of another panel.

Which is the sort of thing that, if you think about it for too long, makes a comics writer want to start drinking. But I seem to be on the train from Southend Victoria to Liverpool Street in London, and there’s no refreshments service.

The lights flicker. Bloody British Rail. As the lights brown out, there’s a strobing, transparent figure at the window, waving his arms. A black fringe of a beard, glasses with large black frames. Bernard Krigstein, circa 1955. I recognise him from photos with Harvey Kurtzman. He seems very concerned with the frame of the window, here in the flicker and strobe. This is what he says:

“Each panel must exist by itself. And the thing that makes a comic page different from every other day in the year is that each of these individual works of art, at the same time as they have a totally individual life of their own, also exist as a total group, as a unit. This was my inspiring motivation in doing comics. If you can pull out your panel and frame it, exhibit it as a panel, and then have the reader unconscious of that as he’s reading the totality, then you’ve done something, in my estimation. You’ve raised comic book art to the level of Goya, if you can achieve that.”

(A dream fragment I wrote around fifteen years ago for no discernable reason)9

THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT

THE RED HOUSE

If you haven’t heard this episode yet, you can listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts, or even go to YouTube if you like:

As a tour of grand old gothic horror / weird fiction, it must, in the grand old words of grand old Mike Moorcock, obey and enjoy the genre. So this is the “Stone Tape” episode as well as the “haunted house” episode.

Nigel Kneale of the QUATERMASS serials wrote that play. I’ve mentioned in previous show notes that he was one of this series’ touchstones for me. Here’s the episode.

I think this is the episode where James Callis had to correct the script on a technical note, which is why, if you’re going to do this sort of thing, you need James Callis.

The Alvin Lucier stuff is all real - something else I’ve been waiting to use in a story for ages. I learned about Liucier in a Paul Morley book about music. You can actually listen to “I Am Sitting In A Room” at this link here. It’s worth a listen just to hear words become music.

Nolan North, who is an amazingly nice guy, actually did his bit from his home studio. I’m sure a bunch of you recognise his name from the many videogames and animations he’s voice-acted in - I happened to watch the UNCHARTED film the other month and caught his cameo in it, a nod to the fact he performed the original videogame version of the lead character. My memory of the session is that we started late and finished early, because Nolan just locked into the piece so fast, even though there was a lot of laughter during the recording.

I first learned of Liver-Eating Johnson as a kid and that name just stuck in my head.

Nolan’s character was more of a dick in the first and quite difficult draft of the script, and it was producer Kevin Kolde who said to me, does he have to be? And it was that question that actually unlocked the episode for me: it didn’t really live on the page until the second draft, and Nolan gives the part the human warmth it needed to fly.

Which becomes a nice counterpoint to James’ Carnack at his most petulant and shitty. I think the direction I gave most often, to James and always to the guest stars, was “Remember! He’s an arsehole!”

Episode 4, THE DEVIL RUNS OUT, with Brett Dalton, is already out.

The best new record I got this week was THE HEAD AS FORM’D IN THE CRIER’S CHOIR by Sarah Davachi, which you can stream for free here. Somewhere between modern classical, ambient and chamber music, but it’s actually immense, room-filling waves and pulses of sound.

But. If you only have one minute thirty seconds. I heard this on the radio the other day, an arrangement of an old Swedish folk song by Lena Willemark & Ale Moller, and it stopped me in my tracks:

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

• On EVERYTHING IS CINEMA: THE WORKING LIFE OF JEAN-LUC GODARD

• brief notes on THE BLACK CIRCLE: A LIFE OF ALEXANDRE KOJEVE, Jeff Love

Should I bring the book reviews back to the newsletter?

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Take care of yourself. See you next week.

W