Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Alex S' LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, May 16th, 2012
8:39 pm	Hoping that Spring last more than a day or two this time So. Last night I saw Hugh Grant and Newsnight's Michael Crick at close range. The former does a proper Clark Kent act when not in public, such that you initially think 'That guy would look like Hugh Grant if he didn't have those rubbish glassesOMGIT'SHUGHBLOODYGRANT!' In other words, Lois Lane is still a bit of a dolt for taking so long to catch on. Michael Crick, on the other hand, looks exactly like Michael Crick. And I saw them because I was at the Labour History Group, where floor-crossing MP Shaun Woodward, veteran journalist Peter Kellner, and a man named Neil who confusingly used to mind Neil Kinnock, were talking about the 1992 election, and why John Major surprised everyone by winning it. Turns out the whole idea about Kinnock's unelectability is an after-the-fact myth, certainly not matching with what was believed within the Tories at the time, or the polls then - even if some of the life-long Labour members still thought, with hindsight, that it was at least in part a fair assessment. Instead, it was specific tactical mis-steps which undid Labour, particular moments of luck which boosted the Conservatives. And the feelings towards John Smith were, to put it mildly, not as nostalgic as I'd expected. But apart from the Hugh Hefner-like image of Robin Cook in his dressing gown on a train (because I've suffered it, so now you must all suffer it too), the main thing with which I came away was the general consensus that both Kinnock and Major were fundamentally decent men, who had a good deal of respect for each other. How alien and long-ago does that sound now? This talk was, of course, by way of a 20th anniversary post-mortem, but was nonetheless handy in its proximity to perfectlyvague's rather good War of the Waleses, Which was officially summarised as "KDC's modern take on a Shakespearean history", though I would describe it more as a Shakespearean take on modern history. Not least in resisting the temptation to do recent politics as an impressions show* (sorry, Michael Sheen, but it has got tiresome). So 1992-7 is held up to the light and rotated, different facets seen - 'Honest John' Major becomes a tragic hero, Diana (not even blonde, but still perfect) recalls Oedipus at Colonus as she feels her mere humanity falling away, and the press magnate declaims and schemes with the earthy evil one expects of the classic malcontent. Not every character can be reinvented, of course - the horror of Blair is still too fresh for him to be played as anything but the loathsome shill he always was. If I go and see friends in plays, then it's because they're talented friends, yet still I don't expect to come away thinking more than 'that was promising, and scenes X and Y, or character Z, was very good'. But this, this was something properly special. Otherwise: two front-room Edinburgh previews, Who is Nish Kumar? and Stu Goldsmith: Prick. Both good, but the latter more to my taste, not least because I was the audience target for the section on men's misconceptions about lesbians. The return of Black Plastic, now in a Dalston club which if it only had some dry ice would look like the nightspot from an eighties film, and which would seemingly rather you take in a 9/11 Truther sticker than chewing gum. The Melting Ice Caps back to the solo setting which suits David's songs best, and a new White Stripes-style live line-up for Philip Jeays. Plus shadow puppets from another act I suspect I wouldn't find terribly interesting without the shadow puppets. *There was a Camilla Parker-Bowles lookalike, but she was only in the audience, so that's OK. Well, except maybe for her. Current Mood: coughing (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 6th, 2012
2:40 pm	Hooked to the silver screen Pootling around the Internet and my MP3 library for the first time in more than a week today. It may not be the most 'productive' use of a day off, but heavens it's welcome. I've been racing around doing fun stuff - living room stand-up from Matt Crosby and Joel Dommett; the Indelicates and the New Royal Family playing either side of a band so bad I think they might have been character comedy; a gallery launch in a Berkeley Square mews; a night of all-girl pop; a day of all-male drinking. And it was all thoroughly marvellous, but now, relax. Oh, and I saw Avengers [Assemble], of course. Which did not disappoint. All but one of the films leading to this nailed the characters perfectly; now they finally have the Hulk right too. Characterisation happens through dialogue and action as the story progresses, not through pausing for a tedious scene of Acting. The Helicarrier looks as awe-inspiring as one can sometimes forget it should, and then the thing happens which is crucial in any major Helicarrier appearance. And the mere fact that it exists, that franchises are being crossed in their prime and not as a barrel-scrape like Aliens versus Predator or Freddie versus Jason, and that it's all been *planned*...well, Grant Morrison already observed that the superheroes were jumping off the page and on to the screen like prehistoric life emerging from the ocean on to dry land. But this feels like the heroes have brought the structure of their universe with them. Other films seen recently, for a given value of the word: Drive and The Killer Inside Me; both essentially mood pieces. For me, the former is much more successful; its violence also felt far more shocking than that in the much more controversial Killer. City of Lost Children - which feels more like Tim Burton than a lot of Tim Burton films. An impossible dock-side city, a steampunk science rig which feels much like I imagine Bioshock might. Ron Perlman in Jean-Paul Gaultier, speaking French, which feels like a violation of the basic laws of nature and that just contributes to the queasy yet oddly solid world that has been built here. Haunting. Jackboots on Whitehall - a misfire. Tries to bring the Team America puppet vibe to a gleefully stupid alternate history of the Second World War, and in doing so demonstrates quite how smart you have to be to make something as successfully stupid as Team America. Also, the DVD is missing a key scene, but at least that means I get a refund on it. The Lion in Winter - do you ever wonder how the wisecracking couples in screwball comedies might fare in later life? How all that plotting and quipping might start to wear after a decade or three together? Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf feels to me like a bit of an answer, but this is a better one, because here the couple are Peter O'Toole's Henry II, and Katharine Hepburn's Eleanor of Aquitaine, so between them they determine the fate of an empire. Also, Anthony Hopkins is one of their sons, and he's been having an affair with Timothy Dalton. This is as good as films without explosions get (there are some swordfights, but they're not very good). The Lair of the White Worm: aside from the obligatory scenes of topless nuns, this doesn't even feel like a Ken Russell film, just a fairly bad horror film which happens to feature the young Hugh Grant and an unnervingly fresh-faced Peter Capaldi. Who, being Scottish, has bagpipes with him on an archaeological dig. Obviously. Pretty Persuasion feels more like Heathers than any other teen film I've seen - that same deviousness, that understanding of just how nasty teenagers can be. The big difference here is that the boys are sidelined - mostly just fulfilling plot roles, rather than characters in themselves. And the adult men...well, like most men, they're really just teenage boys too, only older. Bleak, and I'm unsure about the ending - but then I don't like the ending of Heathers either. Current Mood: relaxed (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012
7:05 pm	Must post quickly before mad feline resets page again I've finally finished watching The Ascent of Man, which is every bit as impressive an achievement as its reputation suggests, tracing human history from before the beginning to 'the present day' (ie, the early seventies), in the process showing up most supposed documentaries as the facile, fragmentary toss they are. Seriously, if Adam Curtis has a copy of this, he watches it on long dark nights, then curls up and weeps. Should we make contact with some actual intelligent life, and have a few days to win them over, then this would be the ideal introduction, a 'Previously...In The Human Race' intro which - the Holocaust episode notwithstanding - makes us look a fair bit cooler than we usually are. It's angry at times, rightly so, but optimistic with it. It is, essentially, a factual counterpart to The Wire in terms of What TV Can Do. Anyway, perhaps because Olaf Stapledon's future history Last and First Men is one of the very few works to operate on anything like the same scale, I found myself flicking through that - but it wasn't my copy, it was the library's more recent edition, with an introduction by science fiction writer Gregory Benford. An introduction which disses the first few chapters, advising new readers to skip them entirely, because "Stapledon proved to be completely wrong about the near term". Now, granted Stapledon predicted that what we now know as the Second World War would be vastly more destructive than it was - but everyone from Waugh to Wells made the same mistake, something we now tend to forget because it seems obscene that such an awful, epochal conflict was in fact a mild drizzle compared to the final downpour so widely predicted. Beyond that, though, here's Stapledon's near future: - "With Europe exhausted, America and China eventually become the world's superpowers. Had they learned from the best of each other, this might have foreshadowed a golden age; instead, there was an exchange not of virtues but of vices." - The emergent global culture falls, for various complex reasons, into a one-dimensional worship of ceaseless, purposeless motion. True, the motion in Stapledon's future is the literal movement of planes in aerobatics, not the abstract dance of finance and 'growth', but I think we can forgive that. - Inevitably, this foolhardy cult begins to tax Earth's resources, but the high priests blindly insist that the answer is ever more of the same; their god must be placated, so everyday luxury, even health, is sacrificed in order that the ritual functions can continue. If only he had been wrong. (Somewhere in the back of my mind, some of my more quixotic components have now become fascinated by the idea of a Last and First Men roleplaying game, perhaps utilising the fact that the Last Men, two billion years hence, can travel back telepathically to any period of the human past) Between this and the stuttering, perhaps-foolhardy progress through Blake's 7. I've not been watching much current TV. Justified, of course, especially now that the rest of the show is almost up to the level of Timothy Olyphant's central performance as the wry, unflappable lawman. But beyond that, it didn't help that everything seemed to have converged on Wednesdays, 10pm. I opted, of course, for Sons of Anarchy - which has been correctly summarised as Hamlet on Harleys, if Lady Macbeth had been swapped for Gertrude. Except...you know how Hamlet is all about delays and dithering? I think Sons may have overtaken it on that point. The fourth series artfully twisted the knots ever tighter, limiting the number of characters and their options, making clear there was only one way this could end. Except - it didn't. Yes, the reason for that was not entirely implausible - I sometimes wonder if the baroque profusion of clashing law enforcement agencies in the US exists solely so that TV shows apparently headed for their Götterdämmerung can then stall everything with an inter-organisational pissing contest. And yet, still, the season ended feeling like the show should have ended. I'm tempted to jump ship here, but I suspect the need to know What Happens Next will lure me just as it has always lured humanity to disappointing sequels. Current Mood: cat-haunted (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 7th, 2012
4:25 pm	Full of stars Most of the people I know in bands appear to be off in the Midlands this weekend. So what better time to be nice about them online, when I will feel less like I'm sucking up? Yes, I am totally brilliant at logic, why do you ask? In no particular order: steve586's new project aka Ladies & Gentlemen aka Steven Dogs In The Wild, who get points just for knowing certain members of the audience might be 'pedantic about Greek myths' and are influenced principally by Scott Walker when he was good. They are able to overcome even the fact of making their debut in a shamelessly greenwashed venue whose eco-cred seems to consist of predictions about car use in 2010 still collaged to the walls, a chandelier made of 'recycled' (by which they mean full) biros, and flogging Strongbow for £3.50 a can. Jonny Cola & the A-Grades, playing the much more pleasing (but equally new to me) Black Heart in Camden (which I would definitely recommend next time someone asks me for venue ideas). Somewhere along the way, they appear to have become a proper band. They are also part of a theme where bands have supports who, if not good, are at least on the same wavelength as them. Here it's Thee Orphans, some of whom used to be the glorious These Animal Men, but who now sound like Slade without the songs. Similarly with the lovely, bruised-but-unbowed slow anthems of Rebekah Delgado at the Lexington. The late-night-whiskey sound of Madam makes for a perfectly matched support, and while the third act is not to my taste (one Regina Spektor is enough for me, thanks), if she is going to find an audience then it will likely be among fans of Delgado and Madam. The bands playing at Flabby Dagger in Dalston are none of them my thing. In fact, they're all making a bloody racket. And yet, they make complementary rackets, and rackets which do somehow fit with the excellent fare the DJs are mostly playing, everything from 'Ring My Bell' to the Dead Kennedys. And then, of course, you have the exception, the more common London gigging experience. Quimper are playing a night which is running a week late, thus clashing with the comeback show by the New Royal Family. Apparently this was because the promoter told the headliners the 31st. It's unclear whether this referred to the headliners who don't show up, or the ones who have a Keith TotP-style revolving line-up and lack of rehearsals, and as such could presumably have done the 24th just as well. Fortunately, in spite of the thrown-together situation, Quimper's electronic poems of malice win converts, so the experience wasn't a total fiasco. Otherwise: I've visited the new look King's Cross, and wished that all temples to consumerism could at least be this pretty. There's a station bookshop called Watermark, part of an American/Australian chain who seem to be aiming higher than those grisly WH Smith outlets which stations normally use. There's the Parcel Yard, which we decided could be London's biggest pub, though its labyrinthine structure makes it difficult to be sure. I've been on a psychogeographical odyssey (and not, as one friend on whom I cancelled had thought, a pub crawl) in Shooter's Hill, where the palace of the moon goddess rises amidst sunny suburban streets straight out of a Ladybird book, in that strange patchwork land where London flickers out at the edges. I've danced to girl pop in Stokey, and remembered how much I've missed pop in clubs, and got excited to have a new night about which to get excited for the first time in ages. Life's pretty good. Current Mood: fragile (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 6th, 2012
10:57 am	I might even manage two posts this weekend ...because there isn't a great deal on, and I have another one pretty much written up with Wot I Dun, and lovely xandratheblue was all retro and got me roped into one of those Five Questions businesses from days of yore. 1/A mad scientists give you to chance to die by super-evolved nuclear owl or nano-kitten-bots. Which do you choose? Swarm of nanobots has to be quicker and less gory than being snacked on by an owl. Also, they would probably make the remains into something more useful than radioactive pellets. 2/Which velvet jacket? ALL THE VELVET JACKETS. But I think the midnight blue one without the buttonhole is probably the most versatile. 3/Would you ever have sex with a robot? Would it depend on how much like a 'real' human it was, or you prefer it not to look like a real human? Well, I wouldn't want to have sex with Robbie the Robot, but on the other hand something that was trying too hard to pass could get a bit uncanny valley (and wouldn't that be the perfect name for an android orifice?). But somewhere between the two could be very attractive. Or, of course, a fully convincing android a la Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner. (I have previously mentioned the Björkbots in the 'All is Full of Love' video in this context. Turns out it hasn't aged too well, but I definitely wasn't the only person who was rather taken with that clip at the time) 4/If you were a girl for a day, what would you do? Would it make a difference whether you were a beautiful girl or not? I imagine the main difference would be that, were I not beautiful, my day's activities - while broadly similar in character - would be undertaken solo. 5/Would you really want to rule the world? Well, obviously there's part of me that would like my face carved on the Moon, but really? I think I'd rather be a shadowy Grand Vizier-type figure, pulling strings from behind the scenes but still able to go out in public, and without having to do the boring everyday stuff. More than that, even, I'd probably prefer someone actually civilised, like Iain M Banks' Culture, to come along and stop the self-destructive brats known as 'humanity' from playing with sockets and hot surfaces. I just want to be able to tootle around reading, and seeing people, and sitting in fields, without having to put up with mediaeval crap like work, and preventable diseases spread by religion, and the environment getting chewed up by fools. But if events fell such that accomplishing that were possible by way of my going all Authority on six billion morons' collective arse in the meantime, then I'd consider it pretty much a moral responsibility. Current Mood: relaxed (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 21st, 2012
5:01 pm	At least this makes two entries in March, which is more than I managed in February On Friday I was at Nuisance, and Spearmint's 'Sweeping the Nation' was spun before those bloody tables were off the dancefloor, and it made me sad that this hymn to the overlooked was being overlooked once more. But then on Saturday, as I arrived at the too-seldom If You Tolerate Bis, what should be the first song playing as I pay? Damn right. And this time, there was a floor! And dancing! And two songs later was 'You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve'. HELL YES. Not that I only go to retro indie nights, honest. Two Saturdays earlier I was out in London's Fashionable East London at a self-parodic art opening, briefly elevated by dance-and-light elements which turned a clear plastic shelf (in itself, an Express writer's idea of modern art) into a sort of phantasmal butterfly. Though even this was accompanied by a soundtrack of abrasive noise obviously intended as some form of confrontation, but which I found quite soothing. At one point someone farted and I wondered if this was also part of the artist's multi-sensory assault. And on the intervening weekend I went, briefly, to a cocktail place on Covent Garden. You know when you're in the West End on a weekend, and you see the normal people up from the outer zones for a night on the town, and wonder where they go? This place is one of the answers, and they're welcome to it. Also: Hillingdon, which I have passed plenty of times on the Oxford Tube. It always looked - by night, anyway - like a strange, shining city of glass and steel had left its outpost in the wilds. Up close...not so much. It is also very noisy, and what appeared to be a zombie pigeon was on the stairs. But the territory between there and Ickenham is lovely, that edge of the suburbs country where you get lots of waste ground, streams, trees, a rope swing or two on which a friend of a friend is always rumoured to have broken something, just because that keeps everyone alert. The sort of place that's fairly hopeless once you become a teenager but, up to about 12, is heaven. And now I am in Devon, where I spent the morning in a weirdly Mediterranean fishing village, and have just finished chopping wood. Delightful. Current Mood: content (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 3rd, 2012
2:17 pm	I love the sound of spring outside the window Almost managed two posts in a week again there, then instead decided to wait, consider, compress. Who knows why? Once things like the Spring view over the East juxtaposed with a spot of tabletop WAR, then White Russians the next evening, would have sufficed for a paragraph's worth of pondering, if not a post's. What remains? The Avengers, for one. Not the film - though it is currently monopolising my forthcoming cinema excitement reserves - but the old series which has necessitated its UK renaming, and by that I do mean the *old* series. I'd never seen anything before the episodes with Diana Rigg as Emma Peel before, and Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale feels, for the most part, like her prototype. What's more surprising is the other elements - the plots which are more conventional espionage, even at times faintly CSI, as against the ludicrous carnival of British eccentricity which comes later. In particular, three of the episodes we watched had an obsession with missiles which made the whole thing more Cold War, less Kinks. The one exception, the one which felt like classic Avengers, was 'Intercrime' by Doctor Who mainstays Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. But even there the quips don't quite work, Steed feels a little too much the secret agent rather than the perfect gentleman, and so forth. They're not bad shows, certainly not by the standards of the time (and I'd still take them over most current investigative TV) - they're just not yet The Avengers. Underworld was the first Doctor Who story to be shown in my lifetime. And blow me, special effects have improved a lot during that time. There was sod all money available to film it, but whereas the new series approaches that by constructing ingenious plays in lifts like 'Midnight', or just effects-light, small-cast affairs, Underworld tells what's probably one of the TV series' more would-be epic tales - a race disastrously uplifted by the Time Lords, a ship which has been questing for a hundred thousand years, another around which a degenerate civilisation has arisen, never knowing anything is outside. The mismatch between ambition and budget is dealt with by having all the scenery back-projected. Now, some people think this looks dodgy and fake in modern attempts like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but trust me, you've not seen dodgy and fake until you see the seventies version. On the plus side, at least the cast can't bump into the scenery - even if that means their feet are either floating above it or disappearing into it instead. Gigs: Quimper again, at Nambucca, which has acknowledged its place as the absolute limit by adopting the sign of Omega. If they claimed to be the Ω of live music, wit might be demonstrated; instead, some claims have them as the ohmhm of live music, and others as the ohmme. Nitwits. The bill makes no sense, but at least one of the support bands has one song which suggests they like McLusky. Quimper accidentally headline, which is only right and proper but leaves them pretty much preaching to the choir. 'The King in Yellow' remains my favourite, but then I'm biased. Also: the DDR of R'n'B down in Putney. Even more than most of the West, Putney reminds me of cities in the first Civilisation; it has a set store of elements, but most of them move around between visits. Once I finally locate the Half Moon, I am not entirely surprised to find that the famous blues venue is now a gastropub. It does still have a great venue room out back, which I would certainly recommend to people wanting to do a night were it not, as I may have mentioned, in Putney. The Nuns are, as ever, electric; and Blindness impress me with their echoes of the good bits of Curve. But even though it's Thee Faction's night, I'm not wholly sold on them in these surrounds. In a crumbling Clapton halfway house, their socialist R'n'B felt urgent and true; there's nothing wrong with how they play this time, but the moneyed surroundings seem to neutralise some of their fire, and leave it feeling like the schtick for which (again, in a fairly posh venue) I initially mistook it. Current Mood: busy (Comment on this)
Monday, February 13th, 2012
8:14 pm	Neverland Not that I ever documented everything on here, because I am not that flavour of insane, but I do miss the old entries which, taken together, formed almost an encyclopaedia of oneself. Now it's just glimpses from the window of a speeding train, while the passing observations, the news and the baiting get spat out on Facebook instead. At least the Timeline over there, for all the inevitable complaints, mean that one has an archive of sorts again. So. What to report in this particular fragment? There was snow, wasn't there? And fine snow, of whose methods I approved: come down heavy for a couple of hours; turn Highbury Fields (my favourite part of London for snow) into a wonderland just in time for me to walk across it to Glam Racket in my big new boots, with Kate Bush in my ears and flakes settling on my shoulders; stick around one more day so that there can be snowball fights and snow Daleks on the Parkland Walk; and then off. The odd snowman can still be seen here and there, slowly shifting form like Ovid went monochrome, but there are no pavements of miserable slush, no desperate clinging on. I appreciate this sense of timing in a weather condition, and hope other seasons learn from it. Oh yes, and I went to the Windmill - where I could also have been tonight, but there's only so much time and energy for jaunts to the wilds, and I must to Putney later this week. The Indelicates have a new song, in which Simon sings about disgust. I think he may inadvertently have nicked the intro from Jeays' 'Arles', though he denies it, and if he keeps telling his bandmates that since they don't know it, they'll just ruin it if he joins in, then I shan't complain. Pop needs more scorn. Current Mood: moody (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 29th, 2012
2:11 pm	Partied out London life appears to be cycling up again, the diary filling and the weeks of temperance (through illness or lack of event, not some talismanic fool belief in detox) coming to an end; if doubt remains, then you always know for sure that it's kicking off again once you're stood in the back room of the Wilmington watching giant robots fight off space dinosaurs with the help of indie rock. Back to the clubs and pubs and dinner parties - and back to Kentish Town. Did ever a district combine side street charm with high street horror to such an extent? Four places I wanted to go before Ale Meat Cider - one simply failed me, and three were on unscheduled shutdown (one by the fire brigade). In the meantime, I've been reading, and putting the new Necron list throught its paces on the tabletop*, and relishing Gregg Araki's Kaboom, which mixes his usual polymorphous perversity with apocalyptic conspiracy and creative swearing, and less so Arrietty which is, like every non-Miyazaki Ghibli film I've seen, faintly disappointing. The visual richness, the gardens into which you just want to melt, are present and correct - but the characters and the plot just feel a little...conventional, up until an ending which is at once conventional and not even a logical conclusion of what has gone before. And, most importantly, I've been to the Isle of Wight with xandratheblue. Yes, it's still definitely England, even if it's not Great Britain, but it's my first time overseas in years, or with her. So we meandered around the island on a bus that seemed to be the equivalent of the Circle Line if it had a view and was faintly reliable, and saw clicking owls and cartwheeling monkeys and a Roman mosaic of a cock-headed man (NOT LIKE THAT), and stayed in a hotel on a lake, and because she's a city girl she seemed almost as excited to have rabbits and sheep pointed out from the train window as to travel on a hovercraft. Though it was noticeable that the other passengers were a lot more subdued on the return trip, presumably because of the Costa Concordia footage on the screens in the waiting room. I don't know why, given we were using a totally different means of transport and the captain wasn't Italian. Though in his shoes I wouldn't have been able to resist a loud 'Mamma mia!' or two within earshot of the nervous travellers. *With most pleasing results, except against Blood Angels. Current Mood: tired (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 8th, 2012
1:57 pm	The Arena of the Unwell So I'm reading back through the week's LJ, and seeing excited posts about the return of Soul Mole/Don't Stop Moving - which from the vantage point of The Future, I now know to have been gazumped, because most London venues are run by vermin. And I have a rotten cold. At the weekend. Thus far, 2012 is not going entirely to plan. However! I did manage to drag myself out last night for a bit, so I've finally been inside Aces & Eights, which I've passed dozens of times and thought looked interesting - and indeed it does, having that American bar (but still doing pints) vibe that T Bird used to before their identity crisis. And on Friday Guided Missile put on a whole bill of bands who are all about the live experience (Keith TotP, the Angry Bees and the London Dirthole Company), and made me think Bill Drummond-influenced thoughts about the limitations of recorded music as a medium. Not that I'd go as far as Bill and write it off entirely, you understand, but part of the point of Bill Drummond is that he goes further than everyone else. Also this week: I watched Hussein stand-in flick The Devil's Double, which is almost as good as I'd heard, and saw a Celeb! getting Papped! in Soho without having the faintest glimmer of a clue who she was. Right. More Lemsip, then I need to brave Tesco. If nothing else, I suppose I can spread my sniffles to the gormless hordes who infest it on Sundays. Current Mood: sneezy (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 2nd, 2012
12:40 pm	Happy New Year So, last day of hols - and given it is general hols, I'm a little surprised there wasn't more going on yesterday. For a few years New Year's Day drinking seemed to be a thing, and I liked that, because it almost seems more important to get the new year off started than to round off the old - look forward instead of back. But Hell, the weather was frightful yesterday, and there was Sherlock to watch (best yet), and Hacks (passably amusing), and I also had Super, which is pretty much the mid-point between Kick-Ass and Defendor in terms of films about real-world superheroes. It stars that guy from the American Office who looks like an inbred dog, ( minor spoilers ) And it really shows up the problem with *real* real-world superheroes, which is that even the best of them, like Phoenix Jones, are failing to hit criminals in the head with wrenches. Before that: a birthday, which went to plan, and a New Year's Eve which didn't quite, both at N19. Dancing to ALL THE NINETIES at Never Forget, which I've been meaning and failing to attend since its arrival. The annual Freaky Trigger pub crawl, which I joined as it went in and out the Eagle, then followed through the horror of the Bavarian Beerhouse to the archetypal old man's pub that is the Prince Arthur, then high-fiving a small dog as we headed through Hoxton and into unknown territories, where pubs look set to be horrific, but serve their cider from earthenware flagons. It hasn't been a bad little week, all told. Current Mood: serene (Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 14th, 2011
10:02 am	Albums of 2011 Yes, well. Not a vintage year, was it? I've only got a Top 20, which I think is the least since I started doing these. On the plus side, that means it's feasible to write a little bit about *why* each album is ace, something I never really had time for before. ( And let's mix things up and do it countdown-style ) Current Mood: festive, a bit (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 5th, 2011
10:18 pm	I'm damned, of course. But then, aren't all the best people? Quiet Fridays and big Saturdays for the past couple of weeks. But then most people seemed to stay in for Prince night on BBC4. The main thing I took away from the documentary was that I'd been too charitable in saying for years that 'Gold' was his last good song - hearing it again, it was in fact balls. Whereas finally seeing Purple Rain, I was mainly surprised by how ready Prince in his prime was to look a right twat. It's not something you expect of a...somewhat idiosyncratic pop star in their own vehicle, but as with Eminem in 8 Mile, it does wonders for my opinion of him. Or him then, at any rate, And the first Saturday: a Deptford Beach Babes show in the Horatia, which aside from the small detail of being on Holloway Road, is clearly a provincial town's one alternative pub. In some ways that's good - a remarkably catholic clientele for somewhere as clique-prone as London. In others, less so - the gig ran an hour late and at one point there was a proper pub ruck. Otherwise: pub, party, and a cancelled gig which instead became my first trip to Ed's Diner. I used to have arteries, I'm sure I did. But, because too much normal social behaviour would never do, I was sure to balance it all out with a wodge of Doctor Who. An afternoon of Brigadier-centric stories had been mooted months pack by way of a tribute, both character and actor having died this year...but then you have to bear in mind that his prime underling is Sergeant Benton, and we ended up watching them just after the Richmond Park video blew up, and no, it didn't get tired, though that may have been because we were drinking. Day of the Daleks is really much better than I remembered. Jon Pertwee demonstrating his martial arts wizardry without spilling a drop of his wine! Jo Grant being so stupid that even the furniture judges her! And the human puppet ruler of the Dalek-dominated future Earth is clearly Charlie Brooker in metallic sheen make-up! Not that it had anything to do with the Brig, but we also watched 'Night and the Doctor' the mini-episodes from the DVD of last season. You know how people complained that Amy never seemed to get the emotional reaction you'd expect to the theft of her daughter? That's explained here. So's every other continuity glitch in the history of Doctor Who. It's a lot quicker than you might expect, and also terribly moving, and true. And then a couple of days later, Nightmare of Eden. A late-period Tom Baker story of which we knew little, and thus a presumed stinker, but in fact rather fun. Deeply, deeply 1970s - it's all jobsworths, dodgy facial hair and venality, but even the dastardly intergalactic drug dealers set their guns to stun. The stakes are low, but Who doesn't need to have the fate of the Earth or the universe at risk every time, something it was good to see the new series remembering this year. Current Mood: sleepy (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 24th, 2011
3:46 pm	That awkward spell slightly too early to start feeling festive Another delicious day off, so I should probably update this thing while there's a slightly greater chance of anyone reading it. Plenty of good gigs lately - the final Vichy Government show and the first for Quimper was a fine passing of the torch, or 'passing of the torture' as Mr Chilton creatively misheard it. There were some bands in between, but the less said about that the better - though I was amused by this review: "blended with a cover or two (my favourite had to be Red Hot Chili’s ‘Give it Away’), which not only kept the whole crowd engaged, but completed energised.". Which is not technically untrue, if you count the aforementioned Mr Chilton running upstairs, screaming about the horror, as 'energised'. And then, a couple of nights on, Keith TotP, gloriously shambolic as ever, and Kit Richardson (who was much better than I expected from an unknown quantity singer-songwriter, and even got away with covering QotSA's 'No One Knows'), and the Indelicates. Who are always very good, but with a few of the more seldom-played songs breaking up the familiar set, were simply jaw-dropping. John Brunner's The Jagged Orbit is not on the same level as The Sheep Look Up, let alone his masterpiece Stand on Zanzibar, though it forms part of the same project: a prismatic view from c1970 of the dystopian near future ie now. But, though it's didactic in places, though the whole emphasis on race war and apartheid was mercifully mistaken, elsewhere it demonstrates the same prophetic gifts as those greater books. Here is "this incomprehensibly complex modern world where the forces of economics and macroplanning ruled with the impersonal detachment of storm and drought", a world of veils on Western streets and churnalism in place of news, of casual psychopharmacology and near-ubiquitous diagnoses of newly-created mental illnesses. Hell, Brunner never quite managed to predict the Internet - though at times you can sense him groping mere hair-breadths from it - but he still managed to see that the world of the future would need what we now know as the spam filter. Though I'm sure that my friends who work in TV would have some bitter words with his shade regarding the sections on making a TV show: in the second decade of the 21st century, computers mean the editing process takes a matter of minutes! Interestingly, although the nicked-from-John-Dos-Passos-then-improved narrative technique of Sheep and Zanzibar isn't fully realised yet, there are sections where Brunner shows his workings, pasting in an article (often from the Guardian) from the papers of his day, usually one ending with recommendations for avoiding future escalation of the problem it describes. That'll be a chapter. The next chapter, titled "Assumption regarding the foregoing made for the purposes of the story", will read in full: "Either it wasn't done, or it didn't work." Spartacus: Gods of the Arena avoids the traps of a prequel well. Yes, there are characters you know can't die, and others you know won't be sticking around - but there are still plenty of bad things that can happen short of death, especially in a show this wickedly inventive, and there's more than one way for a character to exit the stage, even with death so close at hand. It's very much in the same vein as Blood and Sand - though there are times when you wonder if they feel the parent series was, somehow, slightly lacking in the sex and gore department. The one real revelation is that the guy who plays Crixus can in fact act, and had just been very good at playing a complacent lunk when that was where the character was. Current Mood: cheerful (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 16th, 2011
2:25 pm	Full of drunk teenagers - and not in a good way!* Got another reminder last week of how much I dislike big gigs these days, whoever's playing. Maybe if I go to another I should get a seat? Not because I'm getting older, but because the rest of the crowd are - at Magazine I think the only punters I saw younger than me had been brought by their dad who, like most of the audience, looked like he'd been into Magazine first time around. And really, trying to be part of the energy down on the floor doesn't work so well when it's just a load of old blokes (plus a very occasional woman) standing around. And did venues all look the same like this before a few years back? I remember the Shepherd's Bush Empire and the Kentish Town Forum having their own personalities, but now I can barely remember which one I'm in (and that's not down to intoxication, not at their drinks prices). Magazine themselves were...as you'd expect. They played a little more of the new stuff than I'd hoped, and 'Because You're Frightened' was a surprising omission. The banter was a little embarrassing. Devoto describing them as "Magazine version 6.0 service pack 1 - thank you for upgrading" just emphasised the sense that, whereas on record their music still evokes a sense of vast, alien horizons and urban nightmarescapes, live it's always going to be forcibly grounded by the fact you're watching a bunch of old guys (plus a couple of ringers). Far more satisfactory - and far stranger - was Luke Haines at the Old Queen's Head. I don't even especially like his wrestling album - its reference points are a little before my time - but seeing it done in that living-room-like space, with Kendo Nagasaki sat at the side of the stage watching TV, and a psychedelic rabbit stew recipe for an encore...well, that's not a gig where you end up wishing you'd stuck to the recordings on your headphones, is it? Or the weekend before, where I'd seen Thee Faction punching out songs about GDH Cole in a community centre where one of the crowd was dancing with a small dog. These are shows to cherish, not just part of The Live Music Industry. Seen on the screen: the new Tintin film. Which, in 3D at least, is staggering. Most of the 3D films I've seen, it's been a gimmick which made for one or two impressive moments. Coraline was the only one to use it thoroughly, and well. But Tintin simply uses it better. It helps that the motion-capture world has a real physicality - one which reminded me somehow of Frank Quitely's art, cartoony yet still solid; only Bianca Castafiore teeters into the uncanny valley. Whether it will grip on the small screen, or flat, I couldn't say, but on the big screen it seemed a far worthier adaptation that many commentators are giving it credit for. I suspect they're just even older than me, and as such were rendered even more queasy by the rollercoaster ride of it. Underneath one of Islington's libraries is a museum, where there's currently a Joe Orton exhibition called Malicious Damage. Containing, principally, the Islington books which Orton and his lover were gaoled for defacting. 1962 to 2011 could almost seem like a record time from outrage to assimilation if I didn't remember the Times giving away a Pistols CD, but even leaving that aside...they deserved to go to prison for this crap. The detournements of books' covers and blurbs, even taking into account that they predate Photoshop, are clunky and unfunny. Orton and Halliwell claimed to have been treated harshly "because we were queers" - but if this was a gay rights thing, how come they vandalised a book by Auden and Isherwood? If it was a protest against "endless shelves of rubbish", then how come the most common author by a long way is Shakespeare? And most of the rest is blameless guidebooks and handbooks. Set against all this, the exhibition also holds their diary of a trip to more liberated climes, and their sexual adventures there - and it is dreadful, dreary stuff, successful neither as literature nor filth. They were, in summary, louts, not revolutionaries. So if nothing else, with this exhibition Islington libraries get the last laugh. *Primrose Hill on Bonfire Night. Going out among the people made for a change, if nothing else, but not one I am in a hurry to repeat. Current Mood: cynical (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 31st, 2011
8:43 pm	For the dead Local venues the Archway Tavern and Nambucca have both had refits, but the latter is still the same bloody shambles it always was, with the same misguided belief that this is somehow endearingly rock'n'roll. The Archway's transition to some kind of weird nineties theme bar, on the other hand...well, at least the theme seems to extend to what now constitutes a cheap pint, but in the nineties would still have been a nightmarish three quid. The bands at both were led by Davids, and more an exercise in larking about than anything else; both were a great deal of fun. The supports at both were bloody embarrassments. And both were Hallowe'en events, of course*. Normally I'm adamant about celebrating the great festivals on the actual day...but it's Monday today. Even the restless dead don't rise with any enthusiasm on a Monday. Speaking of the dead rising - I finally read DC's zombie superhero epic Blackest Night. Which, to my utter lack of surprise, has all of writer Geoff Johns' usual sins - including that unseemly tendency to get all metatextual about how comics used to be so bright and innocent, and why can't they be like that still, while taking a sordid delight in demonstrating the gruesomeness of the modern by repeated graphic dismebowelments &c. He wants to eat his tasty braaaaains cake and still have it, really. In total, Blackest Night sprawls across seven collected editions of tie-ins (for no real reason beyond perversity, I read the core series last). The Exterminators, on the other hand, covers a mere five books. One of the many comics from Vertigo (aka 'the HBO of comics') to be cancelled before it reached its proposed destination, this was a planned 50-issue series which only made it to 30. Largely because, as writer Simon Oliver acknowledges in a rueful foreword to the final collection, it's about bugs, and so at least a quarter of the potential audience would be too revolted to read it. And it is, make no mistake, a revolting series. But also, for all its fantastical elements, one which feels like it's saying something interesting about humanity, and nature, and the poor schmucks who have to hold the line between the two. Whereas Blackest Night, for all that it manages some lovely tricks with colour, really doesn't have much more to say than 'Dude, if Hawkman was a zombie he'd be even more badass!' Which is not only fairly hollow - it turns out it isn't even true. *Though unlike Christmas creep, Hallowe'en crawl has some limits. On Friday, even in Camden, there was little sign of sexy cats &c. Or at least, not specifically Hallowe'eny ones. The alleged retirement show of Steven Horry, Frontman, with support from Rebekah Delgado and Aurora, was many things, but spooky was not among them. (Comment on this)
Monday, October 24th, 2011
8:45 pm	You have all the weapons you need. Not been feeling too lively the past week or so, for no particular reason. I did make it out for the last wedding of the season, of course, and was very glad of it too - I love when the friends massively outnumber the family instead of vice versa, when the day feels like a ritualisation of joy rather than an obligation, and there can be no finer reading than the toast from Frida Kahlo's wedding. And the night before there was gigging - Bevan 17 with light reflecting from the metal on the bass keys to the mirrorball then back, Gyratory System ("This is great! They're so obnoxious!" - xandratheblue) and The Vichy Government playing like they were in the club scene from It Couldn't Happen Here. Otherwise, leisure time has largely been spent catching up with films. Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch got some dreadful reviews, but of the video game-influenced films I saw last week, it was vastly preferable to Zowie Bowie's Source Code. Seriously, if Jake Gyllenhaal's whiny prick of a character in Source Code is any kind of accurate representation of the modern US military, then no wonder they've been getting such underwhelming results lately. Every twist is visible at least ten minutes away, and the overall effect is of a very nicely-shot episode of Quantum sodding Leap, even down to the sciencey-but-wildly-misapplied title. Whereas Sucker Punch exists in the same genre - call it 'video game psychological/combat musical'? - as Scott Pilgrim. It's darker, more flawed, slightly alarming in places, but for all that, it feels personal, *necessary*, more than extruded Hollywood product, in a way that Source Code never does. And tonight it's Attack the Block, although obviously any Adam or Joe-directed take on London's vicious youth is going to have a hard time competing with Speeding on the Needlebliss. Current Mood: Oh, and one last thing... (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 18th, 2011
7:58 am	In brief - I imagine when Cronenberg's Shivers came out, the parasites and the sex zombie behaviour they cause were pretty shocking, but now they can't compare to the fear and revulsion inspired by the styles worn by uninfected 1975 suburbanites. - I like the Buffalo Bar, which is why it saddened me that after seeing dozens of gigs there with my umbrella safely in hand, one of their bouncers has now decided it is a problem - and worse, started quoting bullshit 'Health and Safety' and 'it's the law' claptrap to that effect. - I need to find out why part of the Regent's Canal, not far from Little Venice, is lined by the aggressively private grounds of oddly squashed Regency palances. But I know that when I do it will be a disappointment. Still, I love the almost post-civilisational greenery of that part of town. - Bevan 17 covering the Sugarcubes' 'Hit' was lovely. 47th Street Demon Exchange covering Therapy?'s 'Nowhere' slowly was inadvisable. Mr Solo covering Cypress Hill was...I don't know what that was. - Sons of Anarchy came back from the debacle of the Oirish season with a finale which used one of my favourite narrative tricks, and not one I would normally have associated with this show. But also lots of badasses staring each other down. Obv. - If David Shah hosts another night at the Wilmington he needs to give himself more stage time with the Soft Close-Ups, and parodic examples of the singer-songwriter genre a lot less. - Community choirs performing in pubs: a lovely idea, so long as you're not too close to them. - Enjoyed the Nuisance band's take on Blur, with steve586 as that hitherto inconceivable creature, a Graham Coxon I don't want to punch. And for all that Nuisance invariably attracts some bell-ends, we had already seen the evening's finest en route, when a yellow Maserati got into a race with our bus, and literally every passenger on it was making jokes about the motorist's inevitably inadequate manhood. - Amusing to see Hamas agreeing with the line from the old Israeli joke about how one Israeli is worth a thousand of theirs. - The Tate's John Martin exhibition is excellent. Yes, maybe he couldn't do lightining or faces - the former more of a problem than the latter - but he's still the go-to man for shit getting real. When an empire - or a mountain - falls, John Martin is your man. Or, when you want the great timeless cities off in the corner of an immense Arcadian landscape where I could quite happily lounge for an infinity or two, he does those also. Wonderful. Current Mood: awake (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 3rd, 2011
4:00 pm	October, and yet still too warm to do the ironing So. A little more than two weeks since I posted about anything but the New 52. During which time I have been to see xandratheblue in sexy cabaret, in the pleasingly post-apocalyptic space the Old Vic have constructed in some old tunnels. And to the National Liberal Club, which is exactly the sort of grand old space where I think of London weddings as properly taking place since attending my first as a child, where people I'd not seen since university made me feel at once terribly old and surprisingly young. And paintballing, which I've never done before, and which is strangely fascinating for the way you really do feel the fog of war (and not just from the goggles steaming up on a day that really doesn't feel like October) - you have no idea whether you've hit anyone, or how many people are out there, or of anything much beyond the need to keep shooting and not get shot*. In the final game, having fallen in defence of the President (our stag, who turned out to be paint-bulletproof anyway), I watched from the Dead Zone as two fighters, unsure of each other's exact locations, frantically duelled from behind cover at a distance of maybe four yards, 'death' having granted an appropriately detached and godlike perspective on the conflicts of the living. Then on to Oxford. Having been to the Other Place, I always thought of Cambridge as simply Oxbridge entire, whereas Oxford is what happens when you attach Oxford to an actual city. But lately I've realised that's not the whole story. Sitting in gentler, more thoroughly English countryside, not the blank, unfinished Fens, Oxford is more truly idyllic. Nor do the winds from the Urals chill it to the bone each winter. I don't know that anyone as thoroughly complacent as a Cameron or a Blair could ever come from somewhere with Cambridge's sharp edges. I think maybe that's been part of the problem these past 15 years. But then, I am of course massively biased. Anyway: waiting at Paddington to assemble the paintballing party, I saw (though nobody else did) a fat child run past dressed as the Eleventh Doctor. Which confirmed that really, the look is not a good one in and of itself. What to make of the latter half of Season 32? I don't know why, but for me it didn't quite fly. I love the Ponds, and they were the best thing in the final episode, but I felt we got a little too much of them. We got the wrong Cybermen (especially when you've just rewatched The Invasion), defeated too soppily. There have been great images, great performances, great lines - none sadder than simply calling Amelia Pond 'Amy Williams' - but somehow they haven't added up to great Doctor Who, not even with a great Doctor in the lead. But now he's stepped back into the shadows, everything changes again, and I'm still very excited to see what happens next. *Though this point was elastic. In one game, as attackers, we could respawn. In all games, by the rules of this establishment, head shots didn't count. I assume they wished to discourage head shots, while assuming that pain and startlement would be sufficient disincentives to stop people from willingly getting themselves headshot as a tactical measure. Given I have a very thick skull, and very thick hair, and a fairly high pain threshold, however, I was basically using my head to draw fire. Current Mood: hot (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011
9:51 pm	DC's reboot considered through the six comics from it I felt like attempting So: DC have just relaunched their entire comics line. As part of a bold and/or desperate attempt to draw in new readers, a fictional world with a publication history stretching back to 1938 just began again from scratch*. Last month's Action Comics was issue 904; this month, like all their other comics, it resets to issue 1. The sense of a vast and complex, and in places beautiful, sandcastle erased by the tide is, of course, a little melancholy. But the advantage to this is that, whereas 1938's Action Comics 1 might have been the birthplace of Superman (and through him a concept - the superhero - which gave the West gods again after two millennia of a pallid Nazarene death cult)...it wasn't actually very good. Superman's creators, Siegel and Shuster, were pioneers, not professionals. 2011's Action Comics 1, on the other hand, is by Grant Morrison - visionary, comics scholar, and mad brilliant bastard. Unlike me, he likes the original Action Comics 1 - but he still retools it, makes something fit for modern purpose, compresses its kineticism and ambiguities down into something bright and shiny and *now*. This is Superman not as establishment superhero, a statuesque head of the superheroic pantheon, but as the bold young Horus-figure, the upsetter, the radical who takes down corrupt businessmen (just like Superman did back in the thirties, before being smoothed down). Whether this energy will last, I don't know, but the first issue is definitely the way to begin. The rest of the relaunch...well, obviously I'm not buying all 52 titles, because some of them looked like guaranteed stinkers, and plenty more like strictly the sort of generic superheroics which I'll read from the library but wouldn't want cluttering the place up. Of the ones I have picked up, some of them don't seem to be bothering with the reboot angle very much ( no spoilers, but the ramble obligatory for any blog with comics content continues herein )In summary: I still have no idea what the Hell DC think they're doing, but they have managed to get five good comics out of it so far, which was more than they've managed any time in recent memory. So...yay? *Well, sort of. This is part of what makes the entire enterprise even more puzzling - some of the events of the past 73 years of comics, already reset and tweaked multiple times, are still part of the universe's history. But we don't know which ones. And the in-story explanation for the reset means there are big, complicated, not-new-reader-friendly machinations behind the scenes, linking all the different comics to varying degrees. Which, again, is not really the way to win over a possible new reader who just saw The Dark Knight and wants to read a Batman comic. Current Mood: pensive (8 Comments |Comment on this)