November 2018 – Nik Dirga

Review: Billy Bragg, Hollywood Cinema, November 21, Auckland

These days, it feels like there’s nothing more revolutionary than being sincere, than just being a man, alone, on stage with a guitar and a message.

Folk singer from Essex Billy Bragg is back in New Zealand for a three-night run of shows at the grand old Hollywood Cinema in Avondale, and his first gig in the series was like a tonic in troubled times.

Being a protesting folk singer in 2018 may seem like a throwback. The old names like Pete Seeger or Phil Ochs are all gone and those that are left are getting up there in years. And it’s so, so hard for a protest singer to find that thin line between hectoring and speechifying, to not get stuck in rant mode eternally. But Bragg has ample humour and an immensely quick wit to carry him through the night. We need more voices like his.

His rallying cry at each show is a rejection of cynicism and a call for activism. Bragg is one thing a lot of musicians aren’t – utterly sincere on stage, clear-eyed without being naive. It’s inspiring and more than a little comforting to see someone unafraid to take a stand and who can sing a song like Woody Guthrie’s “All You Fascists Are Bound To Lose” and make you believe every word of it.

This first night of his run at the Hollywood, Bragg was in fine, upbeat form, playing for over two hours and loosely changing his set on a whim, at one point playing an amazing Leadbelly cover to demonstrate the skiffle sound (which, of course, he’s written a book about). He spoke nearly as much as he sang, on everything from Brexit to Stan Lee, but always engagingly.

With immense control, he spun from a grim recounting and song about America’s history of lynchings to breezily playing a cover of the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” from his busking days. What I’ve always liked about Bragg is his ability to switch gears between the hard-edged protest songs and open-hearted songs about love, or as he called it, “songs about rain and wanking.” Songs like “The Milkman of Human Kindness” or “Greetings to the New Brunette” are little gems of lyrical power and longing.

And when several hundred people are lustily singing along and stamping their feet to “There Is Power In A Union,” for a moment, the world feels like it isn’t completely screwed in the long run.

He capped things off with a biting and clever rewrite of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A’ Changin’” for the Trump era, blasting at the grim tide with lyrics like “The land of the free and the home of the brave / Martin Luther King is spinning in his grave”.

I don’t know about you, but these days I can get behind a protest song or three.

Long live the revolution.

Arrow: Still on target after all these years

After seven seasons, most TV shows start to run out of steam. And we’re in a big superhero TV show glut right now – if you’d told young me that one day there would be too many comic book-based programs out there for me to keep up with, I’d have laughed.

But I always make time for Arrow, the show that kicked off TV’s “Berlanti-verse” of DC Comics-based series including The Flash, Black Lightning and Supergirl. It has its ups and downs, but the hero’s journey of Oliver Queen has always been worth watching. And the new Season 7 has one of the more entertainingly outlandish hooks yet. Oliver Queen, the Green Arrow, is now Prison Inmate 4587.

I admit to getting a fanboy thrill at the end of Season 6, when Oliver Queen is unmasked as the Green Arrow for all the world to see, and shipped off to prison for breaking anti-vigilante laws. A superhero going to prison isn’t entirely a new idea, but to watch it unfold for the hero we’ve been following for six seasons is new.

The considerable charisma of the cast helps here. Stephen Amell has developed into one of the better leading men on superhero shows, full of a rangy self-confidence and physicality. In a lot of ways, Arrow is what an ideal Batman TV series in 2018 could be like – even the character himself has often been written off as an archery-obsessed Dark Knight wanna-be.

One of the minor flaws of the otherwise swell Marvel Universe movies is they often tend to be about massive world-shaking events, so you never really get a feel for the day-to-day drama of the heroes. The actual Avengers were only the Avengers for about 1 1/2 movies in the MCU before everything fell apart, for instance. A TV series in many ways is better able to follow in the month-in, month-out drama of the periodical comic books that inspired it.

By the time Arrow has gotten to Season 7, there’s a rich sense of legacy and history to it all that apes the ever-blooming continuity in 50 to 80 years of the comic books. Oliver Queen’s passed through many life stages – spoiled rich kid, the Hood, the Arrow, the Green Arrow, an orphan, the mayor of Star City (!), a father, a prisoner. He’s gone through a whole costume shop’s worth of sidekicks, from Speedy to Black Canary (a couple of them!) to Ragman to Mr Terrific and Wild Dog. In the process, we’ve seen the character mature from a callow youth to a seasoned veteran.

Arrow is hardly the Citizen Kane of superhero fare, don’t get me wrong. It’s more of a gaudy Saturday-afternoon matinee, with cliffhangers galore, hairy near-escapes and derring-do. The writing can sometimes let the characters down (there’s an awful lot of contrived interpersonal conflict in all these shows, to be honest). Yet I dig it, and love watching Oliver Queen’s journey unfold. Long may his aim be true.

RIP Stan Lee – 1922-2018

Stan Lee was probably the first writer I remember knowing by name as a kid. Even in the late 1970s, when he wasn’t writing Marvel Comics any more, his name was a talisman on everything they published. “STAN LEE PRESENTS” felt like a stamp of Mighty Marvel authenticity, like a key to a secret clubhouse.

If Stan was presenting it, it had to be fun, right?

He was 95, he was in ill health, but still, it’s hard to believe Stan Lee is gone now. He’s been there for my entire reading lifetime. With the death of Steve Ditko earlier this year, it feels like a curtain has been drawn over Marvel Comics’ greatest age.

My first real deep dive into Stan Lee’s own writing came when Marvel Tales, a reprint mag, began running the original Lee/Steve Ditko issues of Amazing Spider-Man from the beginning in 1982. I’d never read them before, and while my pre-teen eyes took a while to get used to Ditko’s more primitive-feeling artwork, I was sucked in to the stories as Spider-Man fought Dr. Doom! Met the Lizard! Battled Doctor Octopus and the Living Brain! Reading these marvellous tales, I realised what all the fuss about “Stan Lee Presents” was really about.

There’ll be a lot of hot takes about Stan’s legacy in coming days, some of which will probably write him off as an overrated wordsmith. But as much as I love Jack Kirby and Ditko, all you have to do is consider their later work without Stan’s touch added – Kirby, fantastic and imaginative yet rarely tethered to earth, or Ditko, surreal and stark yet emotionally ice cold. Combined together, Lee and his collaborators during Marvel’s golden age of the 1960s launched entire cosmologies and a million dreams.

If you want to really examine the seismic effect Stan Lee had on comic book storytelling, read one of DC Comics’ musty early Justice League of America issues from around the same time the Fantastic Four launched. While they’re charming enough, the stiff, military-precise characters are interchangeable and conflict is nonexistent. They fight crime with a smile and brisk efficiency.

Compare that to the Fantastic Four, who in their very first issue are transformed by cosmic rays into superheroes – and immediately start brawling and beating the heck out of each other. They felt alive, in a way that the smiling Justice League didn’t quite seem to be in those days.

Each of the Marvel heroes was flawed in some crucial way – Spider-Man, hobbled by guilt; Hulk, a man turned monster; Iron Man, literally heart-broken thanks to an injury; Captain America, trapped out of time; the mutant X-Men, hunted by humanity.

Lee had already spent decades working in comics before the great creative flowering of 1961 led to the Fantastic Four and so many others. He often said he felt this was his last chance in comics, and so he wrote the stories he wanted to see. He loosened up something crucial in comics storytelling that was rapidly aped by everyone else in the industry.

He was also a huckster, a pitchman PT Barnum would be proud of, a grinning mustached ambassador for comics right till the end, appearing in cheeseball cameos in multimillion-dollar movies forged out of his works. That alchemy propelled Marvel to dominate the comics world starting in the 1970s and really, right until this day – Lee sold himself shamelessly, sometimes embarrassingly, and his final days were marked by an unpleasant feeling that he was being sorely taken advantage of.

But a salesman can still be an artist. Thanks Stan, for everything.

Why you don’t want to be a Tim

I said I wasn’t going to write a lot about politics on this here blog, but the Tims of the world went and pissed me off.

Tim was one of several in a New York magazine article featuring young people who say they probably won’t vote in next week’s primaries.

How did not voting work out for everyone who skipped 2016?

I first voted in a US election in 1992. I first voted in a New Zealand election in 2008, and because I’m a dual citizen, I get to vote in both countries now (New Zealand has national elections every three years; America’s presidential elections are every four, and the ‘mid-terms’ every two, so I get to vote a lot of years).

I’m pretty happy in New Zealand, where I’ve lived for 12 years now, nearly 1/4th of my entire life. We’ve got an awesome Prime Minister right now in charge who’s way cooler than I’ll ever be, and I like having a leader I respect and feel like I can root for. But I still vote in the US, too. I even vote for the sheriff and council in the little mountain county I grew up in and I vote on the 40 or so bizarre and incomprehensible propositions California loves to put on each ballot.

The voter turnout difference between New Zealand and the US depresses the heck out of me. In New Zealand’s 2017 national election, 79% of enrolled voters voted. In the United States, 55.5% of the voting age population showed up. In New Zealand, you’re required to enrol to vote at age 18 (or when you become a citizen). In the US, you’re not.

Despite wanting to keep this blog a T—p-free zone, I don’t hide my political leanings and my feelings on the current direction of the US. I regularly get New Zealanders and others telling me they’re horrified about what’s happened to my country. But I still vote. Even when they make it kinda hard for me to vote overseas – this year, for some reason I had to re-register in California again – I vote. I never quite know if my vote gets there or if it “counts” or “matters”. In my voting lifetime, I think I’ve backed a lot more losers than winners. But I still vote.

It should be easier in America, I fully admit. There’s gerrymandering, there’s voter suppression efforts that reek of racism, there’s about a dozen different ways to cast your vote depending on what state you live in, not all of them foolproof, and for some reason, America still thinks having Election Day be on a Tuesday, a regular work day, instead of a weekend or even a public holiday, makes sense.

The pendulum swings a lot in the US. It swung one way in 2008, another in 2016. Who knows which way it will go next? I don’t have time for anybody living in America in 2018 who doesn’t have time to vote this year. Who thinks it won’t matter. It may not change things – I’ve given up election forecasting for good after the last couple of years – but what the hell else will?

I mean, seriously, Tims of the world. Just do it.