That Black Female Iron Man Rumour

It seems that Marvel Comics is going to make Iron Man a black female in the next series, and she’s modelled on and will be played by Rianna in the movie. Because of course movie. This is getting people’s knickers in a twist. Here’s why you should expect nothing less.

Disclaimer: I do read comics. Transmetropolitan. Fables. Ex Machina. Fuse. Smoke and Ashes. Sex Criminals. Channel Zero. The Filth. Global Frequency. And in earlier days adult days: Love and Rockets. Watchmen. Elektra. In childhood, we’re talking The Eagle, the Beano, MAD magazine. Plus everyone watched Batman on TV. Most of the stuff I read now is published by Vertigo (which is a DC Comics imprint). Good comics are out there. The only superhero movies I have in my DVDs are... Constantine. Yup. That’s it.

I was never one for the superhero comics. I preferred those WW2 / Korean War comics that Roy Liechtenstein riffed on later in the iconic WHAAM!

I wouldn’t read a Marvel or DC comic for all the shelf space they take up in the basement of Forbidden Planet on Shaftesbury Avenue. I’m waaaay hipper than that. I get my comics at GOSH in Soho.

Marvel and DC have been on a Diversity jag. Iron Man being one of many. Various other characters formerly white, male and heterosexual are being made black, gay, female or combinations thereof. Marvel is owned by Disney and DC is owned by Time Warner. Nobody knows how those guys think. Or even if. Disney makes its money from trips to Disneyland / World and its cable TV networks . Comics aren’t even on the graphic. Movies, of which Marvel Studios is just one amongst Pixar, Lucasfilm and Touchstone and Walt Disney, make half as much as the theme parks. Disney want you watching its cable and going to its theme parks. And not to put a Gauntanamo blow-up doll there...


Time-Warner makes $28bn revenue. I don’t think the majority of that comes from comic book sales. Or even movies. It comes from cable subscriptions.

I did have my own theory about why Disney and Time-Warner would be prepared to throw their comic franchises to the SJW’s for some PR to protect their cable TV franchises. But then I decided it was nonsense. But it was one theory. There are others. First, that Disney and Time-Warner employ morons or do stuff because somebody senior enough thought it was a good idea. Second, that they researched this properly and it came out well, so they know what they’re doing. Third, that the research was slanted for it to come out well. Fourth, that they are part of a plot to demonise white masculinity. Fifth, that they know something about the market that the comic fans don’t.

Now I would never underestimate the capacity for big companies to act utterly dumb. Like Columbia Pictures with Ghostbusters. It is after all a division of Sony, and what the hey does Sony know about Western Culture? Kick-ass females are a thing in Japanese culture. Time-Warner bought AOL. I am however trying hard to think of a bad move Disney made in movies.

Let’s give these guys the benefit of the doubt. Let’s suppose they think they know something about the market that comic fans and I don’t. Suppose their research asked women a question like this: If a big adventure or science fiction film had a female leading character, I would be more inclined to see it. That’s how research companies phrase these things. How would a girl not say YES to that, unless she said: Uh like there’s just no like way you would get me to like ever see a movie like that. So now they have research saying that if they put a female lead in, they will get far more female viewers than they will lose white males. I’m betting that’s what has happened. Whether that research holds out at the box office? Well, if this article in Forbes is accurate it seems the girls do see films that have “strong female leads” - and lots of CGI and maybe male eye-candy helps as well (the Divergent series isn’t exactly short on pretty boys). It also looks like girls read comics: there are blogs and everything.

What the guys liked about comics and superheroes was that it was somewhere they could go that the girls weren’t. Somewhere they could go that was untainted by female silly, whimsy, crazy and bitchy. Somewhere that understood them. And now the girls are moving in and spoiling it all.

In which case, it’s time to leave. That’s what men do when too many women move in: we leave. Man flight. Find something else. Spend money on it. The market will grow. But don’t let it get too successful or the big corporations will move in and then the girls will arrive again.

So no, superhero comic lovers, you are not on the front lines of cultural warfare. You’re on the receiving end of properly conducted business. They know you will eventually leave them, but you know what? They are going to replace every one of you with a girl. Sounds like a good deal to me. Your whinging is what they want: Look, the creepy people don’t like it, so it’s safe for you girls to go to the cinema when it’s showing. Heck, soon girls will be seen in comic shops, and then it will be Game Over.

Capitalism turns everything to its advantage.

Soho and Green Park

There haven't been enough photographs recently. This is because I haven't been taking any, because frankly, Sis takes much better photographs than I do, so you should look at those instead. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago there was some actual decent weather in London on Wednesday evening and I had the camera with me and took a few shots.

Transcendent Albums

Some albums have one great track and a bunch of ordinary ones. Some are a string of great songs. Some have hit singles and songs that could have been hit singles. Some bring back memories. And some are simply transcendent.

A transcendent album doesn’t need to have a hit single. It needs songs that you can’t imagine being done any other way, or played in any other order. Songs that enter into the hearts and minds of everyone who hears them, and which together on the album have a consistent mood. Off The Wall is a great album, but Thriller is transcendent. Revolver is a great album, but Sargent Pepper’s is transcendent. John Martyn made Solid Air and Bless The Weather. The Rolling Stones made many great albums, but Goats’ Head Soup has that extra something special. Pink Floyd made The Dark Side of the Moon. Rod Stewart did it with Every Picture Tells a Story. I’ll add Eric B and Rakim’s Paid In Full to the list as well as Springsteen's Born To Run and Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks. Joni Mitchell did it with Blue, Underworld did it with Second Toughest In The Infants, and Digweed and Sasha did it with the very first Renaissance triple-CD. Miles did it with Kind of Blue and In A Silent Way and John Coltrane did it with A Love Supreme and Live at the Village Vanguard. I invite you to consider Goldie’s Timeless as well, since it is. Pete Atkin and Clive James did it with Beware of the Beautiful Stranger. And then there’s the question of John Digweed’s continuing outpouring of flawless work.

This was brought on by hearing Van Morrison’s War Children on Chill Radio. And I realised that he really is the king of transcendence.


Astral Weeks

Moondance

St Dominic’s Preview

Hard Nose The Highway

A run that has never been surpassed. Plus the staggering live album It’s Too Late To Stop Now, where some of the performances are better than the album versions.

And then I considered Steely Dan, who did three in a row...

Can’t Buy A Thrill

Countdown to Ectasy

Pretzel Logic

Still, Van’s The Man.

There Always Was a Brexit Plan B, But Now We Have Plan C

European Parliament President Martin Schultz said: "The British have violated the rules. It is not the EU philosophy that the crowd can decide its fate”.

And you thought politicians were insensitive. I have no idea what DSM-V grade personality disorder Shulz is suffering from, and if there isn't one, it needs to be in DSM-VI. That quote reveals the colossal self-satisfaction and self-righteousness of the anointed elite. And for some reason, I find myself thinking about this song



"Remain" didn't need a plan, because it was the status quo. Plan A was negotiate a Norway-like deal, which was going to be a hard sell to Parliament and the British electorate, but at least it could be talked about.

Plan B was to ignore the Referendum by sheer bureaucratic and political delay. It's what the French did in 2005, after all. That was always a known possibility.

Sadly, the adolescent posturing of the Anointed Ones has pretty much put the kibosh on Plan B. Those old men - and they are all hideously wrinkled old men who couldn't deadlift their trousers - seem to want the UK and all its ungrateful oiks out. How dare some unemployed fisherman in Boston, Lincolnshire vote against the Rule of the Anointed? Be gone, and be damned. So that's that Plan B gone.

This leaves Plan C, which before 2015 would not have been possible, and even after 2015 could not be talked about. This is to tear down the European Commission so that it is simply a civil service with no lawmaking powers, return to a free trade zone, restrict Strasbourg to trade disputes, seal the borders to refugees and have an EU points system for non-EU countries. Everything else stays except benefit tourism, and hiring people for less than some serious minimum wage. That means the UK gets together with other countries, of which there are several, invades Brussels, and breaks the European Commission.

There’s two reasons the EU people are so pissed off with the Brexit vote: a) they have long wanted Britain out of the EU so they could turn it into France, paid for by Germany; b) without the UK, it becomes clear to everyone that the EU is, the Netherlands aside, mostly a bunch of broke-ass failed socialist states, and the illusion that it’s a “world power” of any kind recedes in the haze.

The adolescent posturing by the Anointed Ones contrasts with the behaviour of the career politicians, and especially of the only politician who counts right now, Fraulein Merkel, who is not posturing and appearing reasonable. Right now she’s going down in the history books as the woman who destroyed the EU, and some statesman-like behaviour, to get some sensible talks under way when the Anointed Ones have finished having their fits of righteousness, will go a long way to saving her memory.

If the EU officials can't talk to each other about deals, the national Finance Ministries can talk to each other and the Treasury, and the the German Finance Ministry, with French support, can tell the EU what tune it's prepared to pay for. Such back-channel negotiations are being made more or less inevitable by the childish hissy-fits of the Anointed.

Brexit - Day Four

One of the many things that 9/11 did was to expose a large number of people who looked like “critics” of the West as actual haters. I mean you Noam Chomsky. It was a moral polariser of an event. The 52-48 vote non-binding vote in favour of Britain leaving the EU is set to be another such polarising event. Page through the reader comments in the liberal papers, and read the Financial Times this weekend (the Economist hasn’t come out yet, since it clearly didn’t prepare any articles for the eventuality). The howls and sophistries of the neoliberal elite and its useful-idiot hangers-on are loud and clear. One spin is that this vote is about young (Remain) vs Old (Leave). Another is that it is about Decent Educated People (Remain) vs Oiks (Leave). Except not.

Richmond-Upon-Thames is a slice of God’s Own Estate In Heaven planted on this mundane earth. It has the highest proportion of graduates of any country. It has millionaires walking the streets, it is stuffed to the gills with “middle-class professional people” except for a couple of council estates in the Barnes area. Richmond-upon-Thames should have been 95% Remain. It was 70%. Kensington and Chelsea was 70% and that’s close to being as Heavenly as Richmond. Neither area has a poor segment that's 30% of its population.

So even in Liberal Heaven, almost a third of the people wanted out. And no, it isn’t age. Median age in Richmond is 40. In Bristol, where the median age is 30, nearly 40% wanted out. The correlation with age is weak. The best correlation is with degree of brainwashing possession of a bachelor’s degree or better. (The Guardian data visualisation guys did a fantastic job on the results and real quick.)

The vote showed that when the British people were threatened with “stay or your lives will get worse”, 52% of them replied “Our lives are already worse”. To which one kind commentator said those immortal words “if you think your life is bad now, you just wait”. Ah! Human sympathy! Much more than this, it showed that 17.5 million people - a country larger than at least 20 of the EU members - thought the EC / EU sucks so bad they were prepared to take a few choppy years to get rid of it.

The vote was partly about Angela Merkel’s ill-judged importing of a million unskilled, girl-groping young men whom no-one wanted, and everyone now wants to send back to, well, anywhere that’s not Europe.

But mostly the vote was about all those "well-off" people in London getting their Amazon deliveries, their coffee and Mexican wraps, and their Ubers and Deliveroos, from people with no job security, minimum wages, zero hours contracts and few benefits. While the “well-off” are using mobile phones made by Chinese men and women working fifteen-hour days, and are wearing clothes made by Hondurans paid as much in a year as the “well-off" get in a day. The vote was won by all those people with the crappy jobs supporting the "well-off" people with the "good" jobs.

Because here's the joke: those “well-off” people can’t afford to buy the house I bought at two-and-a-half times earnings. And they think they have “benefited” from the neoliberalism that drives the EC/EU? Oh, wait. Air fares are low. And you can get a cool flat in Oporto from Air B’nB for a week much cheaper than a hotel. So that’s all good then. Ever wonder why people are talking about a shift to the “experience economy”? It’s because most people can’t afford to buy things any more.

Someone just turned off the music and turned up the lights. And behold - the club is tatty, and dirty, and the floor is sticky, and the roof has holes, and the walls have gaps, and someone stole their coat, and the bar prices were ridiculous, and it’s cold and raining outside, and nobody was as remotely as attractive as they looked when the lights were down. But for a few hours the music was loud and everyone thought they were having a good time.

I voted Remain. Didn’t happen. For the moment, we’re still in the EU. I can remember three-day weeks, 25% inflation, 15% mortgage rates, the Miner’s Strike and lord alone what else. That’s why I and the older folk are sanguine. The world has ended many times. And we’re all still here.

I Voted Remain

I voted Remain, not because I’m a Good European, but because...

a) the best deal the UK would get would be like Norway’s, and we’d still be kicking back to Brussels at about the same rate but without the voting and bureaucratic access that goes with it,

b) I don’t believe in the competence of the politicians and civil servants to exploit what advantages there might be in Leaving (look what a grat job they’renot doing with non-EU immigration already), and

c) I do believe that, good Davos 1% Globalists that they are, Cameron, Junker, Merkel and the rest would happily co-operate to teach the uppity English working classes a lesson by plunging them into a recession that will last more or less forever.

Oddly, the few people I know who voted in advance voted Leave, and they are good middle-class young graduate types - the very people who are supposed to be Remain stalwarts. They were reacting to the campaigns as much as anything else, and that’s the wrong thing to do. The campaigns have been egregious, and mostly have been a proxy Conservative party leadership challenge.

Remember, under the British Constitution, Parliament is sovereign and the referendum is only advisory. An honest politician with integrity who believed that leaving the EU would be bad for the British people would seek to defer the decision “until the time is right”, hand on until the next election and see if any party campaigned on “We will keep the promise to get the UK out”. However, I don’t believe that the Cabinet has politicians who are honest and have integrity, and I think that this Cabinet would sink the UK economy just to keep the plebs in line. They did it before, and they will do it again.

I don’t want to give them that opportunity.

Negative Interest Rates and Why We Need A £1,000 Note

This popped up in the daily press summary we get...

Banks in Europe and Japan are rebelling against their central banks' negative interest rates policies. Commerzbank is considering holding cash in expensive deposit boxes instead of keeping it with the ECB, while the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ has warned the Bank of Japan that it could stop its sales of Japanese debt.

In other words… Commerzbank are going to put the money under the mattress.

Aren’t they supposed to have unrivalled networks through which to discover great business opportunities in which to invest that money? So either Commerzbank doesn’t know about the business opportunities out there or it does and there aren’t any. Both can be true. There aren’t any and Commerzbank wouldn’t hear about them if there were. And no, before you ask, fintech start-ups and another sharing app won’t soak up that kind of cash. investment opportunities are skewed: at one end are small opportunities with speculative upsides and almost guaranteed but limited downsides; at the other end are the Crossrails, HS2, Hinkley Point C, Sizewell C, and other humungous vanity projects. The other big stuff, like developing the Dreamliner or Windows 10, is financed by companies, which may simply not need external finance (Apple, Microsoft) or will borrow it against their balance sheet rather than the future profits of a project.

Nope. Looking like the mattress is a good bet.

Central banks have to lie about why they are charging negative interest rates. The real reason is that there’s no way for them to make even a small return on the money other banks deposit with them, because the returns on government debt are so low. They can’t say that, because then the central bank would be admitting that the economy is screwed. So they mutter about using negative interest rates to encourage spending and lending - and that, of course, amounts to saying that there isn’t enough spending and lending going on, because there isn’t anything worth spending on or lending to, and that amounts to saying that the economy is screwed.

Commerzbank are posturing, of course, though they may also be looking at the costs of strongrooms.

Of course, if Commerzbank was going to store money of that amount in deposit boxes, it would need 500 euro notes to do it. Which the ECB wants to get rid of. I say the Bank of England should issue a £500 and even a £1,000 note for exactly these purposes. The Big Four banks in London should build a currency storage facility somewhere in the City. With £1,000 notes, it wouldn’t need to very large. The flight of capital to sterling would be exactly what it needed post-Brexit.