There’s an interesting discussion about “Lola” on Andrew Hickey’s blog, mainly about whether or not it’s problematic in its depiction of trans people:

I’ve dreaded writing about this song, because it’s witty, clever, and one of the catchiest things Ray Davies ever wrote, but it also perpetuates some negative stereotypes about trans people. However, it also shows more respect to trans people than any other pop song I could think of

Which might just be laying too much weight on what’s largely an ironic song gently mocking a young boy having his first encounter with what I always thought was a male transvestite, what with the last line of the song being “But I know what I am I’m glad I’m a man and so is Lola”. It’s the old story of boy meets girl, boy discovers girl is also a boy, boy discovers he couldn’t care less: well, nobody’s perfect.

If you look at it unfavourably, I guess you could say that it enacts that hoary old homo and transphobic fear of straight men being “tricked” into having sex with somebody who’s “really” a man, something that used to be a staple of bad American raunch comedies (or even the Police Academy series).

But I think that’s completely missing the point of “Lola”, which is really about love conquering all, gender not mattering and becoming fluid anyway (“Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world except for Lola”). It’s all done with a wink and a smile, but at its heart it is accepting of trans people more than you could say it is damaging.

To be honest I wasn’t sure he was still alive, but Tom Spurgeon has just reported his death last Saturday, with a very nice obituary in which he called Paape “one of the last remaining ties to the initial heyday of 20th Century French-language comics publishing”. You might best compare him to somebody like Don Heck, an artist with decades of good, solid work under his belt, never quite in the first rank of cartoonists perhaps, but with his own charm nonetheless.

Paape had worked on both Spirou and Tintin weekly comics magazines, the Marvel and DC of Belgian-Franco comics, with Tintin being slightly stuffier and a little bit more respectable. While Paape got his start at Spirou, it was Tintin were he left his mark, starting in the mid-sixties when Greg, the Belgian Stan Lee, took over the magazine as editor/writer and revamped it with more adventure stories, modish and stylish, of which his and Paape’s Luc Orient was one.

Luc Orient has the traditional three man band structure of many European adventure comics, with Luc Orient as the smart, strong, straight but slightly bland leading man, professor Hugo Kala as the brain and occasional comic relief, less physical than Orient but still a man of action and finally Lora, Kala’s secretary and Luc’s friend/love interest, feisty, independent and not nearly as often kidnap bait than e.g. Sue Storm used to be. All three work for Eurocrystal, the leading European science laboratory, in which capacity they go on strange adventures. What sets it apart is that from the start the series was orientated (sorry) towards science fiction, as well as running multiple album storylines at a time when most European series solely dealt with standalone stories.

I discovered Luc Orient in the same way I read most comics as a child: through the local library, together with series like Valerian and Les naufragés du temps. Of those three Luc Orient was the easiest to get into, thanks in no small part to Paape’s artwork. At first sight it looks slightly flat, a bit stilted in its composition and with stiff figures, but if you give it a change you’ll find out that this is a deliberate stylistic choices and that it works well in giving an grounding of realism to these science fictional stories. He was great at drawing technology, real or imagined, some of his design sense surely influencing later science fiction series.

Luc Orient was and is one of my favourite science fiction comic series and I still love the look of Paape’s artwork. For me, Paape was one of the cartoonists who defined what modern Franco-Belgian comics from the late sixties would look like.

Nicholls does go on to say that “it is as if, for a handful of SF writers, Victorian London has come to stand for one of those turning points in history where things can go one way or the other, a turning point peculiarly relevant to SF itself.” It could indeed be argued that, while not all Steampunk or Steampunk-influenced novels are set in Victorian London, the city, to a large extent, dominates these narratives: “a city,” Nicholls observes, where “the modern world was being born.”

But if steampunk is indeed a mulligan on the industrial revolution, a do-ocer to get all the cool toys we didn’t get in the real world (brass computers! armoured zeppelins! cogs on shoes!) as Kip Manley has it, than London surely is the wrong city to use. The industrial revolution happened up ‘orth, in the Midlands, in Lancastershire and Yorkshire, not in the capital, but in the grimy horrible industrial towns and cities Pete Wylie lists here.

Not that London didn’t have industry of course; just that the schwerpunkt of the industrial revolution was never there. Which makes the central role it plays in steampunk imagination all the more strange, until you realise most steampunk writers are as much influenced by Sherlock Holmes as real history. London fits the middle class conciets of steampunk, the desire to have an industrial revolution without the industrial classes. In that regard, London was indeed the city where the future was being born.

Going back home to my parents always means an opportunity to look at the secondhand bookstore there (singular, as there can be only one). This weekend was a good one. I found a nice stack of comics, as well as some other neat books.

What I found were fifteen or so Douwe Dabbert strips, an old serio-comic adventure series written by Donald Duck editor Thom Roep and drawn by Piet Wijn, one of the old grand masters of Marten Toonder’s animation and comic studio. These stories were serialised in the Donald Duck weekly magazine, which always included a non-Disney strip like this, aimed at slightly older readers, in its back pages.

On top of those is a January Jones album, barely visible under the big Goscinny/Uderzo Oumpah-pah omnibus. The latter is sort of a prequel strip to Asterix only set amongst “Red Indians” in French North America. January Jones on the other hand is a retro-adventure ligne claire strip that ran in Sjors en Sjimmie in the early nineties, drawn by Eric Heuvel and written by Martin Lodewijk, one of the Netherlands best scenario writers, who also worked on the Don Lawrence Storm series, the last issues I still needed to get I also found this weekend.

Finally, on top of those there’s a Gerrit de Jager cartoon collection of the strips he did for a newspaper about the economic recession and some normal books: Jane Jacobs The Economy of Cities, David Pearce’s Occupied City and Foch: Man of Orleans by B. H. Liddel Hart.

The box behind all this is a short comics box filled with a mere fraction of the collection of floppies I still have stashed at my parents. I spent an hour on Friday digging through my longboxed and taking out some favourite series and sequences, things I knew I wanted to keep. One of these days all of them need to be moved here, or gotten rid off. The dillemma of every aging comics collector: what do I want to keep, what can I live without.

Arthur B thinks we need to talk about Conan and whether or not Robert E. Howard’s works are worth reading:

But when it comes to more or less any other motivation for reading fantasy fiction – whether you’re angling for improving literature or trashy fun (or trashy literature or improving fun, for that matter), and assuming you are not someone who deliberately reads badly written and offensive fiction for the lulz, there is really no reason to expend time on Howard when there’s a whole world of authors out there who don’t have his grotesque issues and are simply better writers than he is.

In a discussion about Eastercon, a side remark about the offensiveness of complimenting non-native speakers on their English:

English isn’t an optional extra for a lot of people around the world. They are required to learn English to get by in the international world, because English is the lingua franca. Congratulating them like they’re great students, the way we are when we deign to learn other languages, is ignoring the part where we force them to be good at English by dominating the world with our language and treating people like lesser humans when they don’t speak it (or don’t speak it well, or don’t speak it with the “right” accents).

On 8 May 2012 The Netherlands adopted crucial legislation to safeguard an open and secure internet in The Netherlands. It is the first country in Europe to implement net neutrality in the law. In addition, it adopted provisions protecting users against disconnection and wiretapping by providers. Digital rights movement Bits of Freedom calls upon other countries to follow the Dutch example.

[...]

In addition, the law includes an anti-wiretapping provision, restricting internetproviders from using invasive wiretapping technologies, such as deep packet inspection (DPI). They may only do so under limited circumstances, or with explicit consent of the user, which the user may withdraw at any time. The use of DPI gained much attention when KPN admitted that it analysed the traffic of its users to gather information on the use of certain apps. The law allows for wiretapping with a warrant.

Moreover, the law includes a provision ensuring that internet providers can only disconnect their users in a very limited set of circumstances. Internet access is very important for functioning in an information society, and providers currently could on the basis of their terms and conditions disconnect their users for numerous reasons. The provision allows for the disconnection in the case of fraud or when a user doesn’t pay his bills.

There are some specific Dutch clauses to the bill. The bill prohibits filtering of internet all together, providers cannot block any website or service whatsoever, no more blocking of Skype or Youtube on mobile phones just because it costs the providers money. But what it does allow is belief based filtering: there are a few providers who provide internet connections for e.g. Christians who’d rather not be confronted with the wicked outside and those are still legal. Which is as it should be.

The important thing is that no provider is now able to block services or websites they don’t like.

Rich people are generally old people; even well-off people are generally old people. And old people look out for old people, and unfortunately over the past twenty or so years the number of old people has been increasing steadily, which means that the interests of old people dominate over the interests of young people, who just have to eventually take care of the old people. I mean – global warming! We all agreed that that was important, right? And then suddenly rich people – who were also old people – all decided it really wasn’t that important any more, and lectured us all about how the economy demanded that we pretend climate change wasn’t happening. (The economy demands a lot of things. Like tax cuts for rich people – who are, once again, mostly old people.) And when the economy gets better, it doesn’t get better for young people. The story of unemployment in every first world country right now is the same: young people are unemployed at vastly greater rates than old people, with rates double or triple the general unemployment rate.

Most rich people might be old, but most old people aren’t rich. While it is true that younger people are affected more by the current economic crisis, for a lot of elder baby boomers it’s not been a happy time either. MGK’s hypothetical sixty year old, who in his version has had everything going for him would’ve also been eligble for the draft when the war in Vietnam was still ongoing, left university just as the mid-seventies economic depressions (stagflation!) hit, had to suffer years of low to non-existing wage raises in the early eighties in order to safeguard his pension later, be suckered into all kinds of 401(k) schemes that paid out more to the fund managers than to his retirement fund, had hoped to have his house as a nest egg but saw the bottom drop out of the housing market just as he lost his job as well, while the only new job he can find is as greeter at Wal-Mart. And to add insult to injury, he now keeps hearing that social security is broken and needs to be privatised to be saved, when he spent most of the eighties moderating his wage demands to save it…

We shouldn’t really be talking about a generational conflict, of a struggle between old and young people, but rather realise that both generations have been suckered by a small elite of rich people. After the Second World War we had roughly thirty years in which all western countries build up an as fair and equal welfare state as was possible in each country, which in the last thiry years has been steadily attacked by those who saw profit in dismantling it. Talking too much about “old” versus “young” just plays in their hands.

The battlecry of millions of late 20th century/early 21st century suburbanites, Soft Cell’s “Frustration” is one example of how underrated the band is, largely known for its cover of that Northern Soul classic “Tainted Love”. Their other claim of fame of course being one of a whole wave of “gay” (electro)pop bands that broke in eighties Britain: Bronski Beat, Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Communards, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Culture Club undsoweiter. It’s strange how that suddenly happened; you can’t really say England was gay friendly at the time, can you?

This song just popped up on my playlist and I thought I’d share it, as it so perfectly sums up some of my feelings at the moment.

Half a year. Six months. Twentysix weeks. It feels like forever; it also feels like yesterday that Sandra died. It’s just not something I can get used to: it still feels like she should be there, she’s just gone out of the room for a bit. Every day I want to call her on my lunch break, every time when I watch a tv show or listen to a radio programme we used to follow together I want to ask her what she thinks about it, every time I read a book that I think she would like, I want to tell her she shouldn’t read it, as she hated having books recommended to her.

The weekends are the worst; during the week work can be busy enough that I don’t really think about her, but in the weekends there’s too much time and space for the memories and grief to come back. It’s not so much that I spent my weekends staring and sighing, more that literally everything in the house and garden reminds me of Sand. Worse, even the local supermarket makes me think of her as I try to remember her advice on cooking and such. Pathetic, I know.

What I also miss is the structure in my life, a goal. Living alone after having spent the better part of a decade living together with somebody you love deeply is so different from just living on your own. When you’re a couple you live for each other as much as for yourself, at least if you it properly, but now what do I have: my job? My hobbies? The cats? All very nice, for sure, but it doesn’t fill my life like Sandra did. And that’s what I miss the most, having somebody there who makes you feel like what Ella sings about and who you can do the same to.