"there is certainly a need for work on diamonds in the post-War aka the Kanye era" - Lee Knuttila

I’m suffering from a hangover.

A hangover induced by Phonogram – it’s actually a comic, and not the latest alcoholic beverage with an overly generous marketing budget. But a hangover is what I’ve got. My head hurts. My body hurts, and worst of all my heart hurts.

Phonogram I love you, but you’re bringing me down. (See – I can do it too, this quoting from songs thing that is at the same time pithy and affecting. This one’s LCD Soundsystem, ‘New York I Love You’)

But Phonogram. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to simultaneously share it with the whole fucking world and keep it entirely to your self. It’s the kind of personal thing that touches you in a frankly embarrassing way, embarrassing as it reaches deep down into the bottom of that well of shame and worry and fear and brings it to the surface and swishes it around in a big old mess. A beautiful mess, but a mess, nonetheless.

It’s the kind of thing that provokes responses like this one – why the fuck am I even writing this? No one who reads this is going to learn anything actually about Phonogram except on a tenuously connected emotive level. But respond I must – I almost have no say in the matter.

So what do I say about Phonogram, as I sit here and defer eating to write this? I say that it’s Kieron Gillen’s best work (that I’ve read) and his voice reaches out from behind every page. His tone (if that’s even the right word?) is almost… didactic. Here’s your favourite big brother delivering some sage advice straight into your fucking chest.

What the fuck is this, my eyes got misty as I wrote that last sentence. Shit, I’ve never even met the dude and it’s embarrassing me that I feel about it; that I feel he’s speaking right at me.

Because I see a lot of ‘me’ in these pages. Not ‘me’ in the same way that I’m someone with the name ‘Ben Abraham’ – there’s no connection to that. And not ‘me’ in the sense that any of it was ever written ‘about’ me, or for me. I don’t know who it was written for, if it was written for anyone.

But me. I’m right there. In the page with David Kohl (who is clearly a case of Gillen writing semi-autobiographically or my last name isn’t Abraham) and with Laura Heaven, and Seth (oh fuck me, Seth! God damn – who like me doesn’t want to be Seth?) and Kid-with-Knife, and yes, even Penny (though I fucking loathe Penny and everything she stands for, naturally) and Lloyd (Ah, too close to home! Let’s not talk about Lloyd – that would be real shame right there). These are like real people.

And it’s beautiful that it’s probably the end and there’ll never be more Phonogram (barring some actual magic happening) because it… adds to the poignancy in that kind of bullshit-saccharine-romantic kind of way that I’m so fond of. That kind of faux-exclusivity that appeals to people like me (again, it’s that do-I-want-to-evangelise-this-goddamn-amazing-work-or-keep-it-secret).

I just remembered; when I was composing this thing in my head earlier I was going to open with a line about the utter shock of the completely new. Phonogram is shocking in its newness, but at the same time you recognise that it’s not like the metaphor of ‘music as magic’ hasn’t been made before (I have a Bachelor’s Degree in music; I know right? I keep forgetting) but it’s never, ever been taken to such an extreme. Nor such an attractive extreme, and attractive it really is. Can I impress that point? Everything about it I found attractive. Even, no, especially the rule at the Singles Club about ‘No Boy Singers’ – fucking hell! For an awkwardly-trying-my-best-to-be-feminist smart guy like myself that’s fucking catnip right there.

Carrying on the from the point that it’s attractive, I’ll admit that the initial appeal for me was Gillen’s input (and I only got put onto it because Fraser Allison recc’d it, so thanks for that, I guess) but the pictures are also very attractive. I’ve never been a comics appreciator before (and still probably aren’t) but I appreciate just about everything that’s gone into this series. When I read Watchmen (yes, blasphemously only after post- the Zach Snyder adaption) I was annoyed by what I felt was heavy-handed foreshadowing. But that was probably unfair of me since I already knew how it ended by virtue of the film. With Phonogram I had no such preconceptions and so every visual detail added as much as every written one. I know from the glossary at the end of The Single Club that a lot of the visual detail was specified by Gillen, too, but it’s undoubtedly a composite effort, so a hat-tip to McKelvie too.

I read them in order, in the space of about three days – Rue Brittania first, which picked me up and sold me on the world of Phonogram probably in the space of about two pages; but The Singles Club got all of me in one morning. I mainlined it like an addict after a week long hiatus. I love that it was in colour. I love that it was sexy, and full of sex. I love that it was… British, a thing I most definitely am not. But what I am notices and sees resonances in that. I’m something that’s come from that but isn’t that (won’t ever be the same as that) but which calls across the pages and across the distances between our shores and theirs and says something like ‘G’day comrade, good to see you’re having exactly the same shitty problems as us’.

I wrote a week ago that I missed Gillen as a videogames writer. Well, I still do – that hasn’t changed. But I feel better about letting him go as I know that this – this fucking stuff right here? Yeah, it’s not a waste of time. Congratulations Gillen, I’m a convert. Comics aren’t a waste (like I will totally admit I thought they were). Or at least, they don’t have to be. Like games, you know? Games don’t have to be shit (thought frequently they are) and that’s just a fact to deal with and move on.

I’m not going to become a ‘comics nerd’ as one of my friend’s (who is a comics nerd) partner suggested the other day. I’m still not that keen on them, but I’ve been converted from a non-believer into a…. an agnostic perhaps? I don’t know what I am, except that I’m writing this and it’s time to end.

That’s the thing about Phonogram though – it knows people. It knows being people involves trying; trying to be people. What was the line, “And who in God’s name are you trying to be?” (paraphrased)? It was addressed to Laura Heaven, who was trying really hard to be someone else. David Kohl almost tried to be someone else in Rue Brittania, but he couldn’t – it wasn’t worth the effort.

If my identity (games, like obv) were about to die and sublimate everything that was founded on it – just like Brittania and Kohl – if I had to change something, re-center myself on comics or face disappearing, becoming nothing?  If the choice was between becoming someone else and becoming nothing (is that a metaphor for death? Possibly…)? Well, like Kohl, it simply wouldn’t be worth the effort. And that’s cool. That’s totally fine.

I’ll catch up with you later, okay Phonogram? Make some more issues and I’ll throw money at you faster than you can say ‘Damon Albarn is a slick git’. But until then, you’ll just have to settle for fucking me up a bit and letting me go.

Fucking British.

I’ve had a kind of crazy idea for a while now that involves the nature of experience. I’m now quite convinced that experiences come in different varieties and flavours.

Everyone has taken mind (or mood) altering drugs of some kind – caffeine is in just about everything, after all – so we’re reasonably familiar with the concept of being ‘under the influence’. And when things start feeling out of the ordinary, most rational people generally think that something about us has changed, either in our perceptions, our brain chemistry, we’ve gone a bit lunatic or whathaveyou.

But what if the change is not in ourselves but in the actual compositions of the things that make up the experiences we have? I am calling this the ‘tenor’ of experience, and every so often I find myself in circumstances that are so far beyond the expected or the imagined that they have an entirely foreign tenor to them.

The tenor of experience is like a strange new taste in your mouth. It’s like a melody you’ve never heard before that is at once shocking in its familiarity and in its newness. The tenor of experience is the inability to trust your own eyes. The tenor of experience is dream-logic in the real world. The tenor of experience is moonlight flashing off bare skin. The tenor of experience is a touch; it’s a place, and a smell – it’s all of these and more, all at once.

My choice of the word ‘tenor’ here is deliberate, and I think appropriate for the musical connotations it brings. The ‘tenor of experience’ comes with suggestions of shifting into a higher register – if not heightened awareness, then some kind of higher aspect. Music often plays a part in altering the tenor of experience (I find it does) and while brain neuroscience might be able to account for these effects, the science speaks little beyond the conglomeration of effects.

Nothing in my theory of the tenor of experience is to discount the very real effects of mind altered states, but more and more often I’m finding it insufficient to blame these ‘effects’ for the whole range of experience that an altered tenor of experience presents with. As I’m becoming more familiar with Latourian metaphysics and Actor Network Theory the less appealing I am finding the reductive, effect-based answers like ‘it’s just the alcohol talking’ etcetera.

Nothing endures. Everything becomes translated. Beer in the glass becomes translated when it cools, and is translated when it later becomes beer-in-the-stomach. The translation process means nothing is kept in-tact. Nothing endures. Therefore, looking at the end result and pointing to it as the be-all-and-end-all is a bit like looking at a calculus equation before and after integration. You can integrate the equation back to a pre-translated state but you have no access to that intangible ‘constant’ that was lost in the translation process. So I want to step back outside and look at the whole tenor of experience.

If this all comes across a little confused it’s because I’m still feeling the effects of a terrifically altered tenor of experience (involving no illegal drugs, fyi) and writing down this idea is a strategy I am employing in response. If you’ve found anything here at all persuasive, I encourage you to keep the idea of the tenor of experience in mind, see if it’s at all useful in future and let me know. It’s certainly has been useful for me.

Post-script: I just performed a quick google search for the phrase and I’ve clearly not coined an entirely unique one, but I hope my meaning and use of the phrase is ultimately an outstanding one.

When I first saw this trailer for Hilltop Hood’s upcoming DVD release Parade of the Dead I wondered why no one had thought to do something like it sooner. The video seems to be a spoof of the zombie film genre that also functions as a DVD collection of music videos for the Hilltop Hoods songs. It’s an inspired idea, even if the  cross-over between hip hop and zombie films is not completely self evident at first glance. Hip hop and zombie films, I am here to tell you, actually often address quite similar themes.

It’s a reasonably well accepted fact that many Zombie films are meant as subtle (or not so-subtle) critiques of the mindless state of modern urban living. The empty streets of 28 Days Later and the lone figure within them act as a visual metaphor for social isolation and alienation, themes often explicitly addressed in hip hop. The chorus of Sydney hip hop collective The Herd’s song “State of Transit” touches on the impersonal nature of the daily commute:

Same line, same day, all on the same track
We cross paths but barely interact
You got no time to chit chat, you’ve got a schedule to keep
Shooting straight across the city and your’re dodging the sheep
It’s the same line, same day, all on the same track
We cross paths but barely interact
One more 24 hour stretch from daylight to dusk and dusk down to desk

In zombie films, we are shown the worst traits in  people and it’s a truism of the genre that at some point friends and travelling companions will turn each other in order to save themselves. The line that ends up on many T-Shirts and stickers notes pithily that, “I don’t have to outrun them; I just have to outrun you”.

The nihilism that often results from the post-zombie-apocalypse world – where the changed-up rhythms of life often drive one to distraction, or worse – can provide the impetus for the kind of brazen egotism we see in zombie films. We often see characters blowing off steam by destroying or damaging things, and watch as they try and come to terms with their new position near-top-of-the-world in the social order (this is by virtue of the fact that there often is no social order anymore). This ‘King of the World’ mentality is one that also finds a foothold in much hip hop culture and music.

It hardly needs demonstrating, but the Sydney group ‘Horrorshow’ tap into this kind of triumphalist egotism in the opening track ‘Uplift’ from 2008’s The Grey Space. It is tempered, however, with a series of sad admissions of weakness and the track is peppered throughout with this duality of egotism and humility. It’s like Solo can’t decide if he’s happy or terrified with his new position as King of the World:

Welcome to the manifesto of a man who stood the test of time…
…In this cold barren land that I call home I’m just a man searching for the strength to walk alone…
…I’m a national icon in the making here to get my vibe on…

The Hilltop Hoods have a song called ‘Fifty in Five’ off the same State of the Art album from which the track at start was taken. It also deals with apocalyptic themes, covering the through-line of horror and atrocity that spattered the latter half of the twentieth century:

Generation X and generation Y,
And the generation next will degenerate and die,
Cause we got holes in the ozone that we put there ourselves,
Now the poles are a no-go, earths cooking itself…

The anger and activism often expressed in hip hop (and Aussie hip hop in particular) is what initially drew me to the genre. The Herd were my first experience with any kind of political engagement that had a strong sense of justice – of right and wrong – which may in fact help explain it’s attractiveness. For a generation of young materialists who have grown up in the shadow of post-modernity and the politics of spin, this kind of certainty around injustices is exactly what we needed. The Herd’s 77% remains the epitome of this angry revolutionary ideal.

Hip hop has a long tradition of sampling from films, which makes the strange Sean of the Dead-like pairing of the Hood’s music and a zombie apocalypse further comprehensible. The DVD, clearly based on their one song ‘Parade of the Dead’ off the State of the Art album, demonstrates in the chorus many of the themes mentioned above. And it should be noted that the setting of the song as implied in the chorus makes the zombies-as-social-critique even more pertinent, with it’s overtones of poor city planning:

They built my city on top of a grave
Now the dead roam the street like a rotting parade
They poured gasoline on top of a lake
And then they set it on fire so nobody escaped

The last section of the final verse leads into the refrain from the bridge section, setting the scene for the reappropriation of the ‘heads shoulders knees and toes’ children’s song. The image seems straight out of the Dawn of the Dead remake where a pair of chainsaw-equipped busses is driven through a crowd of zombies.

…And just for the fun of it, I stole my neighbour’s Hummer
Put spikes out the side and tied a chainsaw to the front of it

I cut up heads and shoulders, knees and toes
Knees and toes, knees and toes
I cut up heads and shoulders, knees and toes
Knees and toes, knees and toes

I’ll conclude with this stunning video tribute to zombie films, set to The Hilltop Hoods ‘Parade of the Dead’. You can’t help but wonder if this video itself didn’t half inspire the upcoming DVD.