A life that is shadowed by dark appetites or fractured by private vice

How I tired myself out
My hopes were, in all honesty, not high for Are Friends Eclectic? on Friday. It was being held at the Cross Kings (of 'rapey murals' fame) and I've been suspicious of the word 'eclectic' in club names ever since I saw the press for a night which was called simply Eclectic, on the grounds that it played all the different subgenres of drum'n'bass. But

xandratheblue and

retro_geek were DJing within an hour's walk of mine so it would have been churlish not to give it a try, and I'm very glad I did. With the exception of one DJ who seemed intent only on playing fashionable young people's music in remixes which removed all the good bits (why does a version of Wiley's 'Take That' without the buzzing noise even exist?) and had the treble up too high, the music was a good selection, and there were soon enough people in to obscure the walls. Well, except the one which had anime projected on it, that was fine, especially the one about the flying turtle rescuing its friends from inside a giant stone turtle on some island with an ancient turtle civilisation. Yeah, I know it's a bit of a hackneyed plot but they did it with charm. Hightlights included:

exliontamer doing the best gun action I have ever seen to MIA's 'Paper Planes'.

augstone hanging himself from the ceiling with his feather boa during 'She's Lost Control'.

steve586 using the same feather boa for a spot of skipping, which since he's already in The 18 Carat Love Affair, and 'Skipping' is also an Associates track, set me off on the idea of him doing a comedy quest in the manner of Dave Gorman or Danny Wallace (except less sh1t) where he literally enacts other Associates song titles, by eg driving a white car in Germany or playing the spoons in the nude.
We then made the arguably ill-advised decision all to pile back to Aug's for wine, American confectionery and singalongs.

cappuccino_kid was the first to leave, only to find that his door was stuck and nearly have to come back. He managed to kick it in in the end but I was concerned that, being from Belfast, reflex might then take over and he'd try to kneecap the hamster, which would be hard enough sober.
On Saturday, after four hours' sleep, I got up for what was meant to be a lovely walk in the country. Except the member of the party who had suggested this specific walk was 'ill', a story the rest of us soon began to walk. I can hardly complain that the Lea/Lee Valley doesn't even know how to spell itself when I live so close to Har(r)ing(a/e)y, but the directions we had from Waltham Cross station used terms like 'right' and 'left' in ways which didn't really fit the late Soviet concrete feel of the surrounds. Yes, once we found Waltham Abbey it was historically and architecturally lovely, if still rather too actively christian for my liking (even attempting ti claim orthodoxy for the Zodiac on the ceiling). And at first, the riverside walk seemed lovely too. But soon the Tottenham reservoirs were looming on our left (being raised, they essentially look like motorway embankments with the odd life-ring at the top); to our right, a river with no apparent life but the coots, and beyond that, decaying industry. And above us - pylons, diligently following the path. We thought we'd found some signs of rural life with the glimpse of horses ahead, but close up they had upsetting and peculiar growths, which was possibly the last straw (even the horses were out, having moldy bread instead). We bailed at Ponders End - where the only pub seemed to be a Harvester. Cultural tourism ahoy.
Then home via the library for lots of tea, and out again to see the 18 Carat Love Affair, or rather the 14.4 Carat Love Affair, as the bassist was ill (you could maybe subtract further given the fragility of other band members, but the maths would start getting dubious). They were supported by two baffling but keen Japanese bands who had very loud singers; it was perhaps because of this that Steve could barely be heard in the mix when he went for a more subtle/hungover approach. Still not a bad show, though. Headliners Black Daniel were quite something - essentially Har Mar Superstar joining the Dandy Warhols to fill in for a show the Black Eyed Peas couldn't make - but a band like that requires energy, and by this stage I had none. Home again, and bed. Where I pretty much stayed yesterday.

The weekend's viewing:
Anatomy of a Murder: Jimmy Stewart and Lee Remick star in the Murder One of its day, with a surprisingly frank treatment of rape for 1959. Coincidentally, the Saul Bass* titles were homaged in Alan Moore's 'The Anatomy Lesson', which I reread this same weekend because, in the library, I found the new Saga of the Swamp Thing hardcover which finally reprints Moore's first issue on the series, rather than starting with said 'Anatomy Lesson'. Some lovely page layouts, presumably Totleben's, but you can see why prior reprints never bothered with it.
Around The World By Zeppelin, a fabulous compilation of archive footage and diary readings telling the story of a 1930 journey which, were it fictional, would seem heavy-handed. Our protagonist - an aristocratic English journalist, junior partner to an American. They had an affair a while back, and it ended badly, but feelings remain. In Germany, there are extremist riots against reparations; in Japan, meetings hailing a new age of German-Japanese friendship. Stalin blusters as they fly over the endless wastes of Russia, and they are feared lost after a great storm over the Pacific. Back in the US, alive, the men ignore the Midwest passing beneath them, too obsessed with the novelty of being the first airborne traders in stocks and shares. Thinking about it, maybe Glen David Gold or Michael Chabon could do it justice - but they don't need to, because this film exists. Do watch it.
Sons of Anarchy, which having come from a Shield writer, now brings in a Shield actor - and it's poor compromised old Dutch, playing an ATF agent who's a lot more human than he'd like to be. Oh, this is going to be good.

*I always get Saul Bass confused with Lance Bass, the former 'N Sync member and thwarted space traveller. Checking Wikipedia to see if there's any connection, I see no sign of one, but it does claim that his mother's maiden name was Haddock. Is this true? Because Haddock marrying Bass sounds distinctly fishy.

Current Mood: listless
Current Music: Our Lovely Afternoon - The Melting Ice Caps

Bryan Talbot Jumps The (Anthropomorphic, Steampunk) Shark
Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland was one of the most impressive comics achievements of recent years. Unusually, it was an actual 'graphic novel' in format terms - but not in content (being part memoir, part psychogeographical carnival, and all wonderful). It was the sort of thing a non-comics reader could appreciate, and many did - broadsheet reviews, massive bookshop sales, all that. So I was somewhat puzzled when I heard that he'd be following it with an anthropomorphic animal story. This is an area of comics I've never really got - and given it's the area which shades all too easily into the fearful land of the furries, I'm OK with that. I don't mind if a story features a funny animal character for a reason, you understand - just handwave 'genetic engineering' and I'm happy. And obviously something cartoony is fine. But if I'm meant to take a story seriously and it's been cast from Sylvanian Families, I just have a disconnect. This is not to judge the form, because I know other people get the same problem with, say, science fiction - and so long as they don't start making canon judgments based on that, leave it as a personal preference, that's fine (nobody's complaining if you only fancy blondes, so long as you don't then start muttering about Aryan supremacy).
But, even knowing Grandville was unlikely to be my favourite thing Talbot had ever done, I still wanted to read it at some point, and fortunately I found one in Tottenham library (to which I took a small detour on my way back from yesterday's walk, of which more anon). After all, it's a steampunk murder mystery and, with the astonishing Luther Arkwright, Talbot was one of the progenitors of steampunk. He draws good valve.
The problem with this, though, is that steampunk settings often don't make much sense. Certainly not this one, where Napoleon conquered Britain; two centuries later, France grudgingly granted Britain independence after ongoing terrorist campaigns. Well, maybe. But while what we see of British country life is an idealised version of British country life, this free Britain is now supposedly a Socialist Republic. The hero's sidekick talks like Bertie Wooster, but apparently he's doing so in French, the English language now being strictly a parochial and rural argot. I don't feel like these elements match up at all. And, of course, this whole society is populated with talking animals. OK, there are a few humans - 'doughfaces' - but uniquely among all the various species, they don't have citizenship. Why? There's no other evidence of a caste system. And in this land where pigs and dogs are people, we also hear mention of bacon, see a man (or rather, crocodile in top hat) walking his pet dog. I can accept that Mickey Mouse is friends with Goody but owns Pluto - but that was a whimsical world, not the setting for a thriller (and besides, I always preferred Warner Brothers cartoons).
The real icing on this cake, though, is that the crime our heroic badger cop is investigating is a thinly-veiled stand-in for a 9/11 conspiracy theory. A version whose transposition to this nonsensical world handily includes a few changes which make it less of a self-evident farrago of paranoid, puerile idiocies (it comes before an election rather than soon after, for one).
So: a world which makes no sense either on a (pseudo)scientific or narrative level, depicted in a form which makes no sense, apparently promoting a conspiracy theory which makes no sense. Scattered around the background are versions of several famous paintings reimagined for this animal world, and well-done as they are, they're reminiscent of nothing so much as those dogs playing snooker. Which is a sadly accurate summary of the feel of this whole thing. What a waste.

Current Mood: disappointed
Current Music: Small Time Shot Away - Massive Attack

bands, pens, book
The new Tindersticks album has a track called 'Peanuts'. "I know you love peanuts, I don't care that much, but I love you, so I love peanuts too", sings whichever underrated female singer they've got duetting with Stuart now (one downside of Spotify is that it never tells you these things). But when Stuart sings "I still love peanuts" back in that distinctive slur, it really doesn't sound like he's saying 'peanuts'. Any suspicion that this might be mere mischance is squashed on the next track when he's definitely singing "she rode me like a pony". I love that a band so elegantly heartworn can also be so thoroughly puerile.

First gig of the decade last night (unless you count that noisy mob everyone fled after the speakers at Bright Club, which I'd prefer not to). And it was David Devant & his Spirit Wife, which should have been a good kick-off but...well, it was good. It just wasn't great. But then nobody can be as good as them at their best every show, can they? Special mention to Foz? for an excellent jacket.

Went to

jamesward's Stationery Club beforehand - or should I say, 'Hashtag Stationery Club'. The way Twitterers retain the @ in conversation feels oddly formal, like something from a couple of hundred years ago when you would always use the 'Miss' or 'Mr' before a name. And I felt strangely old-fashioned being introduced as someone from the real world, just because Twitter is about the only piece of online tomfoolery where I don't have a presence. The pen selected as Stationery Club's first topic was not entirely to my taste, but the advantage over a book club is that you can turn up and find this out with a minute's loan of someone else's, whereas with a book you usually have to invest at least an hour to convincingly justify the suspicion that it's not for you.

Last year, the Guardian ran an article asking why so few novels deal with work. I thought at the time it was asinine (just to pick one, possibly obscure example - Bridget Jones' Diary?) but having now read Matthew de Abaitua's 2007 The Red Men, it seems doubly so. Of course, it doesn't matter that de Abaitua can write better than any average Booker shortlist could if they all networked their brains and collaborated, because he excludes himself from 'literary' consideration by using science fiction elements (and not doing it in a dumb, 'this is not SF' way, which you can get away with). Plus a dose of Gnosticism, and elements of the techno-thriller. But how else are you meant to address the issue? If you just try to realistically address the office, you get The Office, a dull reflection, even more boring than the original and no more illuminating. When so many people don't even realise how work is taking over their lives, distorting their personalities, how do you address that without making the issue strange and thus noticeable again? So de Abaitua externalises the element of the personality which falls for all the corporate lines - the driven side with no time for family - as the 'red men' of the title, uploaded simulations of employees which turn on their originals if they feel the original is slacking by wanting to do things like kick back and enjoy the fruits of success. Which can hijack any electrical equipment to bug their lazy partners, because some people don't think it's crazily dystopian enough that they're being bugged with official business on the Blackberry, computer and 'phone when they're not in office hours. And so forth. It's not a perfect book - the resolution is so pat it could almost be Jay MacInerney - but as a vision of a very near future London (or rather, the London of a couple of years ago given a couple of twists - the North London Line hasn't even become the Overground yet), it's not bad. And as a novel of work, it's hard to beat.

Current Mood: odd
Current Music: The Real Thing - Faith No More

No 'current music'; am in the process of slowly convincing Norton that Spotify is not a Trojan
The weekend started with a bang at Black Plastic, but was subsequently a fairly quiet one. How terrifyingly grown up of me. Admittedly, Sunday's walk felt considerably less virtuous once we met

msdaccxx coming the other way from Hendon when we were only going to Ally Pally, and any health benefit we might have derived from the project was probably lost somewhere between the wine and the trifle...but I have now done the whole Parkland Walk. Because, in spite of knowing the Finsbury Park to Highgate stretch backwards (whichever direction that might me), I've never done the whole of the rest, not until this weekend. Which meant I'd missed out on one particularly stunning view/potential suicide spot in particular. The Palace itself was playing host to a make-up artists' convention, the crowd around which had more goths and fewer orange people than I would have expected. Also, one person dressed as Johnny Depp in his Alice role.

Thursday was

angelv's birthday, the first time I'd been into town in a while and the first time I'd ever had lovely, lovely strawberry and lime cider. On the bus afterwards, I was sat reading a comic when I was accosted by a stranger. Now, I often daydream about the potential meetings which reading material on public transport might unlock - I blame The Divine Comedy's 'Commuter Love'. But the only time anything ever came of it before was when I was reading Houllebecq's Atomised and, just as we got off the train at Derby, had a brief conversation with a girl who had recently read it and agreed that it was a massive disappointment. And this was no better, though in some ways more interesting, because Thursday's stranger was a psychologist, and having just come from some form of professional function, she was off her bloody face. She asked me whether I identified with any of the characters, and I said it wasn't so much about that as about a form of ritualised conflict, circumscribed yet open-ended and thus always available - much the same as some people find in sport. She asked whether I thought there were superheroes in the real world, and I said no, though there are supervillains - I instanced Dubya and the way he stole the thunder of the DC storyline about Lex Luthor becoming President by being real, and worse (then worried that this answer might sound a bit Tony B Liar, but decided against the balancing example of bin Laden as R'as al Ghul because even after Batman Begins, nobody ever recognises his name). Whether she even remembered any of this the next day, I have no idea, but it was definitely a higher calibre of conversation than one normally gets with drunk randoms on buses.
And because of that, because I haven't really got much else to post, because I needed some warm-up writing to do over the weekend and because I was vaguely thinking about doing something like this after my last general moan about the topic, here's what may or may not be a new regular feature, starting with the title which so interested the drunk psychologist: ( The last two weeks' comics )

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Music: see title. grrr.

Television
A song about Sally Sparrow! I'm not sure whether it's actually any cop; it does that thing that Scott Walker's Seventh Seal does and mainly just summarises the plot of 'Blink' to music. And the music is not massively original. And yet...

Skins got straight to the dark stuff this time out, didn't it? Not just the opening incident, which I suspect will define the whole series, but Thomas' home life, with a nice kid who wants to be a part of society being dragged down by his backwards-ass mother and the insular church she forces him to attend. All too common and tragic an experience for young immigrants, I fear. I love that they start the series here, with the character who's probably furthest from the experience of the average viewer - they don't even feel the need to lure the kids in with the sex and drugs romps first anymore.
Also: never mind the police, when the terrifying authority figures on TV start to look younger, you know you're getting old. Chris Addison? Really?

A double bill of Mad Men was slightly too much for me; I don't know how box set viewers cope. There looks to be a change of direction this season; with Sterling Cooper sold to perfidious Albion (its representatives verging on parody with their love of tea and pubs...oh, wait, I love tea and pubs, don't I?) Don et al have not just lost the agency, they have lost their agency in a wider sense. No longer the buccaneering capitalists of the first two seasons, now they are strangled by contradictory instructions from head office, their work suddenly all for nothing - just like life in a modern office. Which makes it easier to identify with them, but did any of us ever watch Mad Men to see your own situation echoed?
As to the sub-plot about Betty's dad, how did I never notice before that the senile old coot was a John McCain lookalike? Surely a plotline which missed its moment.

I gave up on Secret Diary of a Call Girl around the same time Belle de Jour herself (still pseudonymous at the time) admitted she wouldn't be watching if it weren't about her, but I still wanted to catch a little of Billie interviewing Dr Brooke Magnanti because...well, pictures tell you a little about someone, but not as much as seeing them move and talk. And at first I thought, she's not what I expected, but then I realised, of course she is. I had her down as a lot like several people I know, and if they were being interviewed on TV rather than in the sort of situations her book describes, then yes, they would probably come across like this too.

Just as everyone told me, the final episode of Dollhouse's first season was the best - but, in such a way that you couldn't have made the whole series like that. It needed the build, the weeks of routine assignments, even if they did make for fairly generic TV at the time. Some stories just can't be told best by every component being brilliant, which is a bit of an arse for both the storyteller and the audience - particularly if it means that lots of the audience don't persevere and the storyteller gets cut off after two seasons. The second of which, presumably, will take place in the gap between the penultimate episode of Season One and the finale - which itself then contained moments scattered around from prequel to glimpses of that interim. Babylon 5 tried something like this with 'The Deconstruction of Falling Stars', but even that started by flashing further forward than this, and then went on a linear drive into the far future; here Whedon has really circumscribed where else Dollhouse could have gone, even if he did leave a couple of points ambiguous. The premise, though, is terrifying; like a lot of SF fans I really enjoyed Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon books, but Dollhouse is a much more rigorous take on where personality transfer technology could leave humanity.

Current Mood: tense
Current Music: Goldfish - Siobhan Donaghy

This is exactly the sort of song which normally lets down pop albums, and it's still ace
I'm trying my best to get into the Fyfe Dangerfield solo album but...it's just not as interesting as Guillemots. I think we have to conclude that, in the new terminology, he has 'done a Cheryl'.

With so much good TV restarting this week, I suppose it makes things easier that, its Fast Show pedigree notwithstanding, Bellamy's People is rubbish. The broad-brush caricatures - of a fat man, the Mitford sisters, Andrew Loog Oldham - lack any spark of life, and even when they have a target which is rich in comic potential and really deserves the mockery, a 'community leader', what ought to be funny is not.
Similarly, How Earth Made Us has some stunning footage - especially of a crystal cave deep beneath Mexico - but I'm saved from the need to persevere by the presenter, who is essentially Peter Capaldi playing a prick.

"in a real revolution - not a simple dynastic change or mere reform of institutions - in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment - often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured - that is the definition of revolutionary success."
So wrote Joseph Conrad in 1911's Under Western Eyes, and could the last 99 years have done more to prove his point? Of course, he does not deny that the Russian autocracy against which his revolutionaries strive is itself a grotesque and incoherent tyranny. Similarly, we cannot really claim any better for the deranged kleptocracy which still dares to call itself capitalism and which holds the modern world in so firm a grip. But nor can we realistically believe that a revolution would make things any better when, almost without exception, history shows them making things basically the same, yet slightly worse.

Have also been reading Tokyo Days, Bangkok Nights, a collection of two Vertigo Pop miniseries from 2002-2003. At the time I only read the London one by Peter Milligan which, like so much of his work, remains uncollected (but wasn't that great anyway). These two are by Jonathan Vankin, a writer whose name still means little to me, and on this showing that's no great omission. Both stories have Americans coming up against cultural strangeness and institutional corruption in the relevant cities, and while I've quite liked Giuseppe Camuncoli's Hellblazer art (a gig for which he was blatantly auditioning with his portrayal of the one Brit here), he can't make Bangkok anything more than the sort of clunkingly obvious middlebrow culture clash story which, on screen, would be in with a good chance of an Oscar or two. So why did I bother reading this, or talking about it? Because Tokyo has art by Seth Fisher. I've only been getting into his stuff recently, but it's amazing - he's one of the very few artists to have anything like the sheer physicality of Frank Quitely, but instead of Quitely's hyper-realism it's paired with a cartoonish sensibility somewhere between Philip Bond and manga. It's gorgeous. And there's hardly any of it because, for reasons I've never seen properly explained, Fisher went off the roof of an Osaka club in 2006 and died having never really done any work with a decent writer. So we have to sift through what he could accomplish on a script by Vankin, or Zeb Wells, and wonder what he could have accomplished paired with Milligan or Morrison. Rest in peace, Seth.

Current Mood: still ill
Current Music: Speechless - Lady Gaga

Leaving The House Is Hard Work
Still ill last night so had to skip what sounds like it was a fun MFMO/Mr Solo show, but I had BBC4's Brian Eno night to console me. Except some peculiarity in the signal meant that every few minutes the sound would glitch and the visuals would tesselate into some weird distorted iteration of themselves. Which with most programmes would simply be infuriating, but given Mr Eno's love of inconsistency and accident and self-generating technologies, worked rather well. If you missed it, doubtless it's all on iPlayer (though probably not with those glitches) and there's a bunch of transcripts of extended and deleted scenes from the Paul Morley interview with him here. I know that describing Eno as a wizard is pretty much beyond cliche, but so much of what he says there - the importance of names, the effect of Mondrian - sounds like he has true magical consciousness.
Then today, I opened the front door for the first time in however many hours - to find four amply-manned police vans arrayed around it. They'd just taken some wanted men into custody, apparently. Keeping the streets safe. Splendid. A bit of a startler nonetheless.
Still taken aback by that, I accidentally signed the commies' petition to save the Whittington A&E instead of the Greens', then got into a chat with the latter who seemed very nice but would have been more interested had I lived across the road in Haringey where they have a chance. I said I'd tell my friends over that side to vote for their candidate, so I'm doing that now, OK? Apart from anything else, she's pretty cute. And then when I finally made it to the newsagent's, the next 2000AD was out four days early! It's altogether too much thrill-power for this ailing Earthlet.

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: Wedding Dress - Pentangle

Mostly Comics
This one's going to get geeky, so let's start by establishing that yes, I do sometimes engage in more socially well-adjusted activities. Well, if you can count going to the V&A (they have so much pretty stuff, but what is it *for* when lots of that stuff would be equally at home in the British Museum?), or attending a Britpop night in a Geneva t-shirt, or hanging out with

fugitivemotel and at one stage uttering the phrase "Oz Season 7, starring Wizbit". And OK, at the party I attended on Saturday I did have a conversation about the Sisters of Mercy's much-better-than-other-bands-called-Sisters cover of 'Comfortably Numb'. So yes, it would seem I am in fact a hopeless case. Oh well.

It was September when I last posted a general State of the Comics Union moan. Since when, not much has changed. I've dropped an increasing number of series which, even if I vaguely want to read, I know I'll never want to reread. More are coming - when Astonishing X-Men and Ultimate Avengers reach the end of the current stories, they're out, because they're not bad little superhero romps but nor are they worth more than a quick read courtesy of the library and, if I've mis-guessed what the library will get in, I'll live. Buffy was in line for the same treatment after the sheer galling idiocy both of the identity of the season's Big Bad, and of the manner in which said identity was revealed (online via fake leak, not in the comic itself) - but Joss Whedon wrote the most recent issue himself and reminded me that it was seldom the big stories which made Buffy so much as the little moments, and this was they. Of course, the next arc is by Brad Meltzer and is going to have a Mature Readers warning, between which and his previous work we can doubtless expect some gratuitously rapey mess which gets me right back to quitsville.
But there's just so much coasting going on - and miserable coasting at that. Both DC and Marvel claim that a bright new direction is coming once the grim'n'gritty carnage of current events is done, but I've heard it all before (and I'm barely been reading anything from DC in ages, they're in such a joyless tangle). At Marvel what seemed like a brilliant idea for a while (businessman Norman Osborn aka the Green Goblin talked himself out of responsibility for his crimes and ended up effectively running the country, as the very rich always seem to manage - ring any bells, bankers?) has just been plodding on and on and remorselessly on. And now it has finally reached its endgame - Osborn and his forces attacking Asgard, home of Thor and his fellow gods, which J Michael Straczynski's run on Thor had relocated to Oklahoma. But the comic telling this story, Siege, feels from its first issue more like it's going through the motions of amending the status quo than like the epic story it should be. Brian Bendis, the writer, has previously had problems with the pacing in the middle acts of his big event comics, and this one was shorter so should have been better, but it's as if he's cut not the padded kidriff, but the kick-ass opening.
There's still good stuff, of course; of the titles I praised in September, Ultimate Spider-Man and The Boys are still delivering. The Walking Dead gets better and better, and I don't even much like zombie stories. Vertigo, previously responsible for Sandman, Preacher and The Invisibles among others, has become relevant again with Mike Carey's The Unwritten and Peter Milligan's Greek Street, two very different examinations of the unexpected legacy legends and fictions can have in the modern world. But, will either of them last? The economics of comics are so horribly marginal, it can never be guaranteed; both writers have a string of prematurely-cancelled titles behind them. Word of another casualty has just come in; Phonogram's Kieron Gillen has been doing some lovely work on a space-based screwball comedy X-Men spin-off called S.W.O.R.D., but weak sales mean it ends with the fifth issue. Meanwhile, he's trying his best on Thor but the aforementioned Straczysnki run left him with having to pick up from such a moronic start point (Latveria Is So Bracing!)* that he's really swimming against the current.
Another writer I usually think of as reliably great, Grant Morrison, is in more position to be master of his fate and work, but isn't really putting it to best use. His Batman & Robin hasn't maintained its strong start, getting bogged down in themes he's already done better elsewhere; I feel a real lack of anticipation for the imminent Joe the Barbarian; and as for his Authority...well, OK, it's not really his anymore. It's Keith Giffen scripting Morrison's plots, because Grant stormed off in a huff. And Giffen's a competent enough writer, usually, but it turns out that he can't write British. So Morrison's most thoroughly, heartbreakingly British lead since Greg Feely in The Filth now talks about leaving things in his other 'pants', and his first 'apartment'. The issue of The Boys set amidst the baguette-jousting inhabitants of the village of Franglais had a better ear for dialect than this.

And as if that little diatribe weren't bad enough, today the main thing lifting me out of the sense of 'meh' which comes with this horrible sinus-y cold is the storming victory my new-look Tyranid army managed in last night's game of Warhammer 40,000.

*I love Babylon 5 - mostly - but JMS' comics career has been one frustration after another. Either he loses the plot, or he falls out with the publisher and storms off, or in extreme cases, both. People told me his Thor was excellent but having been burned before, I waited. And I finally read the first two collections recently and lo and behold, this was one of the cases of 'both'. There's a lot to love: instead of talking in cod-Shakespearean English as previous writers so clumsily attempted, his Asgardians speak formally but coherently; it's the themes which echo Shakespeare now, with the prince uneasy on his father's throne, the adviser who whispers poison in a good but naive ear. And the abiding question: what do gods do when their legend is over? If they survived Ragnarok, what now? Yes, in a sense it would have been a better theme back in those days when we were told we'd seen the End of History, but it's still a fascinating one.
However. There are scenes in post-Katrina New Orleans and war-torn Africa which demonstrate that Straczynski hasn't learned a damn thing since his legendarily bad Amazing Spider-Man issue where Doctor Doom stood in the wreckage of the World Trade Centre and wept. And, though I've yet to read the third volume which fully explains how he got to where he left the series, I've seen enough to know that yes, what looked like a stupid idea which Gillen was obliged to pick up, was also a stupid idea approached from the other end.

Current Mood: crappy
Current Music: These Immortal Souls - These Immortal Souls

Chrono-Unific Deficiency Syndrome
Courtesy of

alasdair: Nick Clegg aggressively positions the Lib Dems properly in favour of gay rights, and promises a crackdown on faith schools where homophobic bullying - surprise, surprise - is more common. I don't like the positioning as anti-Tory - because Labour have been guilty of major dereliction of duty on these topics too - but this is the first thing he's done since that pathetic, stupid me-three-ing on the deficit at last year's conference which has made me feel good about his party again.
(On a related-ish note, had our first pub quiz outing in a while on Wednesday under the name Quizlam4UK. Drew the main round - because the Queen's has a fair policy of docking one point for each team member past six - and then missed out on the tiebreak by one measly year. But it's the muffled PA and the music still faintly playing over it during the first half of the quiz which mean we probably won't be going back, not the failure to win. Honest)

The French agency charged with policing online copyright infringement and three-strikes disconnection of filesharers, HADOPI, has a logo which manipulates a copyrighted font without permission. Further evidence (as if any were needed) that these schemes (see also our own Digital Economy Bill) are nothing to do with protecting the rights of creators, they're just about protecting the revenue streams of big business. Although in this instance, they've managed to infringe the copyright of exactly the sort of communications giant they should be protecting, which demonstrates that cluelessness still outweighs conspiracy.

And sticking with France, Alizee's 'Mademoiselle Juliette' video, overlaid with an English translation of the lyrics. I've liked this song and video for ages, for reasons which should be obvious, but I'm still pleasantly surprised by how smart those lyrics are. This is the problem with listening to music in other languages; because there are none where I'm fluent enough to fully follow lyrics (Hell, it's often hard enough in English), I think a buried strain of rockism surfaces in me, so that I'm prepared to take it on trust that Edith Piaf or Serge Gainsbourg's lyrics are terribly witty and wise and passionate, but I presume that Alizee's will just be bubblegum.

Current Mood: rushed
Current Music: Kinky Love - Nancy Sinatra

Because 'privilege' seems to be the hot topic right now - a post bolstering my dead white male cred
Read a book while I was back at the parents' which a recently rediscovered relative had passed on to them, a catalogue of the work of the engraver James Heath, my five-times-great grandfather, introduced with a biographical essay. I knew his son Charles had engraved the Penny Black but of James, little. Turns out he was friends with Fuseli and Sheridan, among others, and that he knew and liked Blake though Blake couldn't stand him (or most other contemporary engravers, so it wasn't exactly personal). That he knew Landseer and Zoffany probably only excites me because they have streets named after them near me (the latter also being the last road in the A-Z), but it was through them that he got involved in a running battle with the Royal Academy, who wouldn't allow engravers full membership. The Academy said that engraving was a purely imitative art, like translation; engravers preferred to think of themselves as kin to musicians, interpreting a composer's score. Now, we can even debate whether translation is as menial as all that, of course, and nowadays there are so many more interpretative arts which nobody ever thinks to deny full standing - from comics art to film direction. But at the time, those were the battle lines. It's a hard one to get worked up about now engraving has gone the way of all things, but it does seem a little snobbish given a good engraver was, back then, the only way your picture could ever be seen by more than the people who could actually make it along to see the original. The picture of Johnson on the first edition of Boswell's Life, for instance, was one of James' engravings.
The downside is that he seems to have spent so much of his time engraving, politicking about engraving or having his houses burn down that he only found time for one other noteworthy incident - when the woman he loved was to be married to another, he not only charged into the church Graduate-style to sweep her away with him - he did so on horseback.

Current Mood: missing the snow
Current Music: I'm Coming Back - PJ Proby

I love this record baby but I can't see straight anymore
Another fine Don't Stop Moving on Saturday, even if our hostess

angelv was too unwell to make it, poor thing. Between the weather outside (if you hadn't noticed, it's a bit nippy) and the Camden Head's tendency to be a bit of a sweatbox I didn't know what best to wear, so ended up with the open-shirt-over-T-shirt look for the first time in ages. A lot of that about these past few days; I also went sledging for the first time in I don't know how long on Friday. I'd gone in search of a sledge on Snow Day 2009 but everywhere which might have sold one was shut on account of the snow, and I can't recall any other opportunities since I've been in London, so it could easily have been a decade. Went down to Richmond Park which always seems quite hilly, but when you specifically want a slope they suddenly prove elusive. We found one in the end, though, and one marked by a ramp constructed at the top to help get that little extra speed at the beginning which makes all the difference between 'OK' and 'GERONIMO!' Oh, I've missed it. But with the way the climate's going, I doubt I'll have to wait so long again, even if by this time next decade we will probably be using the carcasses of rival tribes instead.
With the light glittering off the snow - that unearthly orange when the sun's overhead, shifting purply-pink as it sinks to the horizon - and the parakeets brilliant green against the white background, it went some way to redeem the book I'd taken for the trip, JG Ballard's The Crystal World. Which is only the second novel I've read of his, and has all the problems of the other, Crash. He's a brilliant maker of settings or images - here, a flaw in time which has resulted in a spreading area within the African jungle becoming "that enchanted world, where by day fantastic birds fly through the petrified forest and jewelled crocodiles glitter like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline rivers". But then he doesn't quite know what to do with them so we get these rather blank characters being pointedly ambiguous as they wander around trying to show the settings to best advantage. Worse, he then starts to tell, not show, as he explains the schematic by which they're driven: "for a man so uncertain of his real nature, you can be very calculating"; "Outside this forest everything seems polarized, does it not, divided into black and white? Wait until you reach the trees, Doctor - there, perhaps, these things will be reconciled for you". Because the crystals make everything all rainbow instead, DO YOU SEE?

Something else I'd not done for a long time: watch South Park. My parents had insisted I should watch Imaginationland, then forgot, but

xandratheblue obliged and...yes, it's still hilarious. And you can still defend it as satire if you're embarrassed about laughing at silly stuff. Calling it 'shocking' is a cliche, but one thing did shock me - all the copyrighted characters running around. Totoro, Snarf, a bunch of DC heroes...for sure, there are satire exemptions in the US, but I've read a ton of US-published satires of the Justice League which still had to use analogues of Flash, Superman and Wonder Woman, not the real (or real imaginary) things.
(And I've since seen an EDF ad for some new eco-tariff which not only uses Superman, but gets in footage from what looks to be every film and TV incarnation of the character. For a big name I could understand it, but EDF?)

A Facebook friend has directed me to a way around Spotify's invite process; obviously, as I have an account I can't confirm it still works,but I offer it in the hope it does. The great thing about Spotify is that now you can listen to albums you wouldn't even have bothered stealing. Consider The Kinks' ill-adised rock opera Soap Opera, a rather clunking satire on the celebrity machine. As a product of one of the great bands of the sixties (it's basically between them, the Stones and the Zombies for the crown), I want to hear it. But, given how much better stuff they made, and how much great music other people made, and how much my heart is already pledged elsewhere, then realistically, within a hundred-year span, I'm only going to want to listen to Soap Opera a handful of times. Is it really worth having it sat on my hard drive all the rest of that time? Nope. And this way, Ray Davies may eventually see thruppence ha'penny from my listens, and I wish him well of it.

Current Mood: mattress:heavier than it looks
Current Music: She's On Drugs - The Jazz Butcher

What kind of idiot tries to launch a coup on Snow Day?
So I've finally taken Foxbase Alpha out of the CD player - but only to swap in another St Etienne reissue and start reading London Belongs To Me. I vaguely recall hearing that it was the film rather than the book which inspired their song of the same name (see also 'Wuthering Heights'), but the book feels a lot like an old British film anyway, the sort of black&white minor classic BBC2 shows during the daytime. It has the same sort of narrator, wise but homely, timeless and omniscient but thoroughly rooted - "And what about Percy? After all, it was his morning as much as anybody's else. How is he getting on by now? Well, take a look in his bedroom and see for yourself."
It's also the exact sort of slice of life, state of the nation cross-section which I so despise in the modern middlebrow literary novel. And yet, somehow the distance makes that less of a problem (maybe now it's half-forgotten it has found its level). This even though being published in 1945 yet set in 1938-9 gives it the same pseudo-prescience about the war which I felt lessened Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square (and Hamilton is the closest other writer I know to Norman Collins, about whom I know nothing except that he wrote London Belongs To Me.
That's all pretty ambivalent, isn't it? And I'm not entirely sure why I'm still reading this, but I am, and fairly certain I'm going to read all 700 plus pages, and I think a lot of that is just down to that narratorial voice, and how well it suits London, and how if you can get London right I'll forgive an awful lot else.
(Timing may have helped too, in that it starts at Christmas. In December I kept reading things which I hadn't realised finished at Christmas - from Ian Hunter's Diary of a Rock'n'Roll Star to Batman: The Resurrection of R'as al Ghul and X-Men: Days Of Future Past. Now, another timely choice)

On the whole, it's been a gentle week so far - a milkshake under the Angel's wings, slow progresses through the ice and snow. I missed frolics in the snow yesterday because I assumed there'd be at least another day of it (slightly mistaken, but nevermind, eh?) and because I had a prior appointment for a Doctor Who binge. My route did take me through Clissold Park, though, and I can only assume that young people in Stoke Newington don't play enough violent computer games, because their aim with snowballs is dreadful. But, Doctor Who. In reverse order of merit:
Timelash: any arse who says that the new series isn't as good as the old should be forced to watch this, repeatedly, until they admit the error of their ways. Technobabble, crappy sets, an incoherent plot, risible monsters...Paul Darrow hamming it up is about the only thing which salvages matters, because Colin Baker is trying his best but there's really not much to work with. DVD also features a Making Of in which all the survivors blame the producer and director, who are safely dead, which is cowardly but fun.
The Sontaran Experiment: Tom Baker, Sarah Jane (in a less stylish wardrobe than she now boasts) and hopeless buffoon Harry Sullivan fall down holes and are pursued by a camp robot for two episodes. It was originally meant to be six. Dear heavens. The Sontarans here are not so much a warrior race as galactic bureaucrats (they can't invade without a proper risk assessment). They're not as short as nowadays, but the faces are even sillier.
An Unearthly Child: the unaired pilot version of the very first episode. This is where it all began and the focus on the human characters is closer to the new series than a lot of what came in between. Parts of it still send shivers up the spine, and not just from nostalgia.
City of Death: Tom Baker and Mrs Richard Dawkins charge around Paris at the show's peak, even if the plot by Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth, doesn't make a lick of sense. The DVD also has a fly-on-the-wall documentary following Sardoth, second-to-last of the Jagaroth, as he tries to make a life for himself in the British countryside ("EU rules oblige the government to give Sardoth an enormous house"). It's funny, but not quite as funny as Douglas Adams' script for the episode proper.

Brilliant if too-short interview with Andy Serkis. Apparently method posture for his portrayal of Ian Dury has left him with a "massive weird muscle" in his groin, and Ian's widow and son both responded to early drafts with "He's so much darker, so much more of a cvnt than this". For all that rock biopics tend to disappoint me (so samey), I may make an exception here.

Current Mood: indecisive
Current Music: The Mountains Near Dellray - The Go-Betweens

You're the most wonderful man and I don't want you to die
Happy new decade, all, and it will no doubt surprise few of you to find me beginning with a Doctor Who review.
I'd expected some OTT RTD balls-out insanity like the end of the last full series, so that mostly rather quiet and contemplative little story (with a brief interlude of sh1t blowing up) rather took me by surprise. ( spoilers )
And yet somehow, in spite of having spent most of the second half in tears and still being slightly sniffly now, I don't feel...what's the word I want? Sated, more than satisfied. I suppose with so much changing, it couldn't have felt too much like an ending, lest a generation that has only known Davies and Tennant not come back for Moffat and Smith.

Coincidentally, the last Who audio I listened to was also about Time Lord mindworks dirty tricks - Unregenerate!. The best I'd heard in a while, helped by being eerie - a mood which audio does very well. I heard an audio book, as opposed to play, for the first time recently, Stephen King's Arthur Machen homage 'N', and even though the peculiarities of the form threw me off a little (do you really need to read out the explanation 'he paused' when the speaker can simply pause?), that was devilishly effective too. An ingeniously sadistic story, in which one obsessive-compulsive's tics really do prevent the destruction of the world. Even if the CDs take more than two hours to read 80 pages of story, I think it worked better this way, particularly as an accompaniment to the fairly OCD task of ironing. I certainly don't see how the forthcoming comics adaptation will capture the effect, not even with Alex Maleev on art.

This is probably as good a place as any to talk about Tennant's Hamlet too, isn't it? Which from a ratings point of view probably couldn't have done better than airing between the two parts of his final outing as the Doctor; it's just that I find that sort of crossed streams effect slightly trying (same as, for instance, I can't read anything else by George RR Martin until he either finishes or abandons A Song of Ice and Fire, to which I am already committed. Same as I can't read a Who book between parts of one TV story). Too often I found myself thinking, ah yes, that's one of his Doctorisms there. "What a piece of work is a man" is pretty much the "You humans!" stuff, isn't it? And so forth. Sometimes to the benefit of the play - the "readiness is all" speech works even better overlaid with the knowledge that not just Hamlet but the Doctor is headed for his end. This on top of the difficulty I already have with just watching a play which, between A-Level and Cambridge, I've probably analysed more and deeper and longer than any other work. I see the strings - and that's not a bad thing, because they make one of the most wonderfully intricate cat's cradles a human mind ever constructed. But it does leave me a long way from getting caught up in the surface narrative. In some ways that's for the best, because under the surface all the stuff that looks like flaws, isn't (and without the whole project coming off the wheels like the similarly deliberate but far less satisfactory Measure for Measure); that the play within the play is an idiotic way to prove the Ghost's credentials is a flaw in Hamlet, but a masterstroke in Hamlet.
So was it any good? I don't know. I can't know. I'm too close to the play and the perform(er/ance) to know whether they matched up. But I know it wasn't an embarrassment. I also know that Christopher Eccleston, so desperate to avoid typecasting that he bailed on Who after one series, has never got closer than the Tarantino-style OTT remake that is The Revenger's Tragedy, and that before he was the Doctor. So good on you, Tennant, and good luck with the rest of your career. You were marvellous.

Current Mood: emotionally exhausted
Current Music: Song For Ten - Murray Gold & Neil Hannon

So here I sit in the library on a dismal day at the fag-end of a decade on which nobody quite seems able to put their finger, but a decade at the start of which I wouldn't have been sat writing anything like this, having been strictly a messageboards and emails boy. The post-christmas milestones have been passed; thank you to all who made my birthday, and I remain amazed that the Freaky Trigger pub crawl could find an OK and a great pub within minutes of where I worked for eight years but neither of which I had ever entered (and about how many viable post-apocalyptic Ant&Dec TV formats there are, but over that topic it is probably best to draw a veil). Which means now it's just about waiting out the last 36 hours. Back home, my CD player currently contains one of the first great albums of the previous decade, St Etienne's Foxbase Alpha (albeit in that most noughties of formats, the 2CD deluxe reissue) and a burned copy (the second most noughties format) of what may be one of the next decade's first great albums, the new one from Los Campesinos!. I have no idea what I'm saying here, I just felt the moment should be marked, even if it's not much of a moment.

Current Mood: indescribable
Current Music: Fake '88 - St Et & Tin Tin Duffy

The Middle Of The End Of Time
The reason I didn't get straight online to share my thoughts with the interweb...well, yes, I was also busy on some hard-fought games of Othello with the parents, but beyond that, I simply don't know what to make of it. The first time since the comeback we've had a named Part One and Part Two on TV, and fair enough because it's just too soon to say. I could have done without the Matrix bits, I guessed what "they are coming back" meant as soon as I heard it on the trailers, but the key Being John Simm stuff - I don't know yet whether that was good or not. I have invites for NYD which I may decline simply because I cannot wait one second longer than I need to before finding out where this all goes. Curse you, RTD, you glorious bastard.

In other news, I've finally caught up with Alan Moore's new 'underground' paper Dodgem Logic and...well, the articles by Moore, Graham Linehan and Josie Long are pretty entertaining, as you'd expect, if not any of their best work. The contributors you've not heard of mainly make clear why you've not heard of them; there's a lot of the sort of kneejerk hippy claptrap which eventually saw me lose patience with The Idler, the worst being the Lejome Pindling screed which rehearses the tired old complaints about 'manufactured pop'. Pindling loftily pronounces that Lady Gaga's "lyrical content is trash at best"; I suppose at least that quote is literate (if inane), which is more than can be said for most of his piece. Later he declares "The majority of albums I listen to nowadays have 2 tracks which I would consider good and a further 12 which I would say are questionable", unaware that he is himself one of those filler tracks. In between is the local content, one piece again by Moore, which I almost compared to a Northampton version of the less good bits of the capital's delightful Smoke before realising how unfair that would be. All Moore's previous Northampton work - and presumably his novel-in-progress, Jerusalem, have found the same wonder and strangeness in the town which most other psychogeographers can so much more easily pick up in London. Here, he and his collaborators are just taking the simple route and showing provincial Britain as a denatured, grotty dump. I'll give it another issue or two to settle in, clearly, but I really expect more from Moore.

And is it just me (and my family, in rare consensus) or would Wall-E have been a better film if it were half an hour shorter?

Current Mood: halfway through Balls of Fury
Current Music: It Doesn't Often Snow At Christmas (New Version) - Pet Shop Boys

Le sigh
Snow ahead of Christmas...it's been a while, hasn't it? Proper blizzards of the stuff sometimes, even if by morning it always seems to be mere ice and slush. Which has slowed me down a little, made me less prone to randomly striding about the place, but is nothing like as claustrophobic as having my laptop suddenly keel over on me. Updating from the library now, I can occasionally get a little life out of it but it still feels like something between losing a sense and having the walls close in on you.

The last normal weekend of the noughties, and I started it by going to a nineties night. Then on Saturday, a glam night. Really Sunday should have followed with a fifties night and Monday be set for a thirties event, but nothing suitable was available (though Eddie Argos was just back from Nuremberg, and come to think of it, if Holland Park yesterday didn't feel quite fifties, it didn't feel like the modern day either. West London is weird). The glam night wasn't all seventies, they played 'Glam Rock Cops' and 'Christmas Number One' too, and Glam Chops are technically a noughties band, but when you have Proxy Music playing, that tends to outweigh other factors. When their James Nesbit-a-like Eno took the mic for 'Baby's On Fire',

cappuccino_kid noted that it was a bit like a Smiths tribute act doing 'Getting Away With It'. Which it is, and that would also be awesome. He also proposed an act who, instead of this emphasis on the early material, only cover the last three albums: Roxy Muzak.

Recent viewing:
Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster is the most straightforward of the three films of his I've seen, the closest to a normal B-movie, but it still has moments of the peculiarity only he could bring, most notably the police chief's budgie.
Dollhouse has finally moved away from 'generic TV action format of the week', and even scaled back the sheer rapiness of the concept (they're all volunteers for mindwipes, for a given value of 'volunteer', and get paid off after five years. So that's OK then). It's even had two consecutive episodes with actual plot and progress and, y'know, *watchability*.
Hung ended with the ex-wife plotline we'd all seen coming months back, and I'm hoping the next season dials down the sex comedy aspects (particularly since our gigolo lead never even seems to get any really unattractive clients) and puts more emphasis on the industrial collapse, the death of the American dream and the rest of the properly HBO stuff.
Misfits demonstrated its distance from Heroes even further by going from strength to strength, ending with possibly its best episode. Can someone please put a backing track on Nathan's big speech? Because I loved it and I want to dance to it.

Current Mood: not brilliant
Current Music: December Will Be Magic Again - Kate Bush

Evisceration Conversation
Watching a passable Nabokov travelogue/documentary yesterday, mention was made of the (twice) near-burning of Lolita at the back of Vladimir's house on Seneca Street. And that Wire book I'm reading had made mention of how hard a time David Simon had convincing HBO to make the show, and even then, its survival beyond the third season was by no means certain. And I started thinking, that's what I'd do with a gate between alternate worlds. Not save or conquer parallels that had gone awry, just take people through the stuff that never got made, or never survived. There's plenty we're missing, too - the full runs of Aztek and Big Numbers, more than half of The Canterbury Tales. It would be a productive cultural exchange, and you could make a fortune in the process. Win/win.
(Of course, there'd be a 'Library of Babel' problem where once you started looking you'd find an infinite number of slightly different versions of each lost classic - and indeed, of each extant one. And you'd go mad trying to find the best of them all. This is my problem, even in my daydreams I'm overwhelmed by the endless ramifications of everything)

Saturday night: finally a purpose to the existence of The X Factor manifests, as it delays the start of Soul Mole, meaning I can after all go see the Indelicates. Briefly I wonder whether this is such a good idea - they were so very perfect the last couple of times I saw them, surely this can only disappoint? See parenthesis above; I think too hard sometimes. They are bassless, and have a questionable backing track for 'Savages', so in that sense they are imperfect. But, somehow it still works, feels different not worse. When you're operating within the field of greatness, there's a lot of variation possible without diminution. Support is Keith TOTP, who is very loud and covers 'Lonely This Christmas' while wearing a black Santa hat emblazoned with 'Bah Humbug'. Good stuff.
Then on to Soul Mole for the usual dance-'til-feet-hurt-then-keep-dancing fun. I think it may now be the club I've been attending longest? If so, it richly deserves that.
On my Sunday trip to

beingjdc's annual festive bash, the first bendy bus has a bit of a spasm and the back doors won't shut. The driver tries to fix the bus by...turning it off and on again. It doesn't work. Their end cannot come too soon. The two I got yesterday behaved rather better, admittedly, as I made a late visit to the bafflingly-redesigned 12 Bar to see that rare beast, a Soft Close-Ups show. The promised elephants are absent, but as well as their own songs (and while 'Ditch The Theory' remains my favourite, 'Fireworks' is rapidly closing on it) we get a rather beautiful cover of 'Life on the Crescent'. As a Devant song, I know a lot of people love it, but I never quite felt it fit the band. Here, it belongs.

Current Mood: weird
Current Music: Rocking Carol - New Order

Some Thoughts On Some Books
Not a Books of the Year post (though if you're asking, probably Charlie Stross' Wireless, Glen David Gold's Sunnyside and the Luke Haines memoir). Just some recent reads, for my own benefit as much as anything:

The Wire - Truth Be Told is exactly the sort of book which is described as 'essential' while being nothing of the sort. For all its supposed difficulty, The Wire is not The Invisibles; everything you need to know is there on the screen. But that a book like this, a programme guide-cum-companion, can now be a respectable hardback says so much about how geek culture is now mainstream - it's not just that our shows are now prime time TV, it's that even other shows are now appreciated in the way our shows used to be. The quality varies; David Simon's introduction, predictably, is amazing, while some of the other contributions are pedestrian but not unpleasant, magazine-standard stuff. One detail which irritated me was the parochialism; in that intro, Simon talks about the venality of network TV, how the shows service the advertising and not vice versa, and holds up HBO as a rare exception to the model, without ever hinting that over here, we've had something like the subscription cable model for decades - it's called the license fee, and it powers the only TV empire comparable to HBO in the quality of its output. Come to think of it, why don't the BBC make more of that too?
Elsewhere, Simon and Ed Burns interview Melvin Williams, who played the Deacon in the show, and in real life was something of a Stringer Bell figure, a legendarily smart drug kingpin. Williams appears to be under the impression that in 'England' smack is legal, and junkies can get it for less than a dollar, so drug gangs have no margin. I can only assume this to be a confused understanding of methadone prescriptions, but still, what the Hell? And neither Simon nor Burns picks him up on it.

I've never read any Ian Rankin before, though I enjoyed BBC4's Reichenbach Falls which was based on a story of his. So when I heard he was going to be writing some Hellblazer, I was moderately excited. Except in the event the story in question, Dark Entries, wasn't published in the comic, instead being used to launch the new Vertigo Crime series of compact hardback gra phic novels. Which was a questionable decision because it's considerably less 'crime' than a lot of Constantine stories, being instead a reality TV satire which then becomes outright supernatural - there's none of the grimy backstreet dealing one expects from Constantine, the overlap between the mob and infernal underworlds. Clearly the branding was just because Rankin is known to crime fans. Although if they're aiming mainly at Rankin fans, why in the back is there an ad claiming "Before John Constantine, There Was John Rebus", even though Constantine made his debut two years before Rebus?
But, that's all a matter of format and editorial. It's not Rankin's fault. Judge him on the story, considered as a Hellblazer run. Any good?
No. About on a par with Paul Jenkins, the worst extended run in the comic's history. The satire on reality TV (essentially the set-up is Big Brother in a fake haunted house) would be clunking even if it weren't so dated. The twist is crashingly obvious. The characterisation is unremarkable. Any urge I had to read Rankin's fiction just vanished, particularly since I already have two unread books by another Scottish crime writer, Denise Mina, who did a much better run on Constantine a couple of years back.

I read Alan Campbell's Scar Night a while back, and was impressed; I think I characterised it as China Mieville meets His Dark Materials albeit not quite *that* good. Since then, I have only really thought of Alan Campbell when I'm trying to add an Alan Moore tag to an entry and always get Campbell suggested first, but I finally got around to the sequel, Iron Angel. And it's not dire, but...one of the main things reviews of Scar Night said was, this is too good to be anyone's first book. Reading Iron Angel, with its clumsinesses of pacing, its occasional lapses of characterisation and its baffling lapses into clumsy moralising, makes me wonder if he actually wrote this first and then went back and filled in the backstory. The biggest problem, though, is that the first book's greatest strength was the city of Deepgate itself - a crumbling theocracy suspended by immense chains over a vast abyss. Without spoiling too much, Deepgate is barely in this book, and the other locations - the desert, a poison forest, even Hell itself - just don't feel quite so richly realised. I'll still read the third and final volume sometime (the cliffhanger on which the second part ends is rather impressive), but I can wait.

Current Mood: concerned
Current Music: Tyrannosaurus Rex For Christmas - The Lovely Eggs

Running the ripples from shore to shore
'The Solitary Life of Cranes' is a lovely, strange little programme; the men who operate those towering cranes one sees dotted about explaining their experiences and perspective, over beautiful footage of London from a vantage point most of us will never share - high enough to be silent and detached, but low enough to recognise individual people. They come across quite like Wim Wenders' take on angels.

Two launch parties for

augstone products this week; the H Bird single release and the Oxford Dons premiere. The former was fairly subdued; the latter, I think it is fair to say, got a bit out of hand, culminating in a spontaneous performance by Keith TOTP & His Minor 18 Carat All Star Backing Close-Ups (Featuring

exliontamer), or something like that, which I'm hoping hasn't got us all barred from the N19 because I'm doing my birthday there this year. The show/film/artefact itself is hilarious, and coming soon to an internet near you. And I'm only an extra in this one.
In between launches, went to the Serpentine Gallery for the first time. Which is silly, but I hadn't realised a) it's free and b) one of the attendants is a friend. Small for a London gallery, but it has the advantage of being set in a ruddy great park, albeit one where the squirrels are no respecters of personal space. The current show, Design Real, is simply well-designed items laid out like artworks, and labelled only with a generic - SHOES, KNIFE, ARMOUR. If you want more, you can check the website - or go the central room, where there are Kindles with the same information. And never having used a Kindle before, I did find them very intuitive and pleasant to use, but they're considerably less portable than a paperback so I don't think text's iPod moment has come quite yet. After that,

xandratheblue took me for veggie fish and chips, a matter on which I must respectfully disagree with both her and

hoshuteki. I think the problem is, they both eat fish and expected something along similar lines. Whereas if someone presents me with chunks of deep-fried halloumi, I don't really mind what they call it, I just murmur 'cheeeeeeese' and adopt a blissed-out expression. Cheeeeeeeeese.

Philip Jeays' Christmas shows on the Barge have often tended towards the drunken (not least the time we took a trip to the beach afterwards), but last night still felt unusually tinged with chaos. The first sign was when, after the usual pleasant-but-would-work-better-in-the-background set from Peacock, the annual Speech Painter ordeal began. Except - he had a new poem. A reworking of Phil's 'Geoff', the song in which Phil talks about wanting to kill Geoff for his house, and shagging his wife. The reworking is called 'Phil', and you can imagine the general tone. The natural order is overturned! The Speech Painter is fighting back, and stranger, getting laughs!
From then on, everything feels slightly rackety. The boat is shaking more than usual. The new song with which Phil opens has the chorus "They're all whores!" (repeat x 3). I'm the first person whose number comes up (well, except the berk who requested 'Idiots In Uniform', but they clearly don't count) and when I ask on a sudden whim for 'London' instead of 'The Raj', there's confusion as to which version I mean. Lots of people are claiming tickets they don't have - including, in a moment of Epic Fail, the one Jeays took himself. Busted. One request is actually refused, which I don't think I've ever seen before. One table have to be reprimanded for talking.
And yet, amongst it all, the songs. There are some strange choices made, but also some of the best - 'Here I Am', 'Midnight in Trieste', 'Perry County'. In a world which has embraced Richard Hawley, there really should be broadsheet features for Philip Jeays too.

Current Mood: lucky
Current Music: Jeanette, Isabella - Tori Amos

Stand back, I'm going to try Science!
Last week's wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey episode of Misfits got a lot of love from the papers. And yes, it was gripping and well-acted and all that - but it was also fundamentally flawed, because they cheated. ( spoilers )

I've not updated with anything in the diaristic line in a week, have I? And even though that week included Robin Ince hosting Bright Club: Space, and establishing that the Shaftesbury is a perfectly acceptable local pub in spite of my failure ever to have had a drink there before, and was generally fairly entertaining, I still somehow feel none of it quite makes for Content. Except the final Poptimism of the noughties, perhaps, which did as good a job as can be done of summing up a very fractured decade in pop - I think Girls Aloud got more tracks played than any other band, which is only right and proper. Though clearly there were always going to be omissions; walking to my bus stop after, the South Bank skaters were pulling stunts to N*E*R*D and I thought, oh yeah, we didn't get them. But how can I complain when I got to dance to 'The Thong Song' while wearing a Green Lantern ring? Yes, I really am that cool.

Current Mood: content
Current Music: It's Cliched To Be Cynical At Christmas - Half Man Half Biscuit

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