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

Evisceration Conversation

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:47:58 GMT

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.

Some Thoughts On Some Books

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:48:38 GMT

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.

Running the ripples from shore to shore

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:06:04 GMT

'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.

Stand back, I'm going to try Science!

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:04:10 GMT

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. Every time we've seen Curtis go back in time using his powers, he has then lived through the repeated time at the standard one-second-per-second rate. So when he goes back to the night he gets busted, stops himself getting busted...and then flashes forward to find that because he wasn't on community service, the rest of the group got killed - that's changing the rules. Yes, this way he gets taught a lesson about responsibility, and sets up a dilemma for next week because now he's not split up with his old girlfriend...but if that's changed, why would he have got together with Alisha in the first place? He doesn't seem like that kind of guy. If his power had worked the same way we've always seen it work before, he could still make sure that he was at the community centre on the day of the empowering storm, as a passerby. And, because he'd know everything else that was going to happen, he could also save the obnoxious chav boy (if he could be bothered) and set up a solution whereby they could stop the psycho probation worker without killing him, thereby getting the whole murder business off their backs. Plus, while he's living through the however-many-months second time around, he can place a few canny bets here and there - though never twice at the same bookmaker, obviously. Hell, even I can remember a couple of surprise sporting results from that period, and then you've got Michael Jackson dying before he does any of his O2 shows...

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.

Albums Of The Year

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:43:18 GMT

I can't be faffed with all these lists of the decade which are doing the rounds - not least because I haven't been keeping an ongoing list through the decade, so I'd end up with some sort of half-remembered mess I'd be regretting within the week. But this I do every year, and keep a running tally for, and justify because I know it's got a couple of friends into a few great records over the years and really, how much more than that can any of us hope to accomplish with our LJs?

1. The Liberty of Norton Folgate - Madness
2. Wonders Never Cease - Mr Solo
3. It's Not Me, It's You - Lily Allen
4. Truelove's Gutter - Richard Hawley
5. London - Philip Jeays
6. You've Created A Monster - Brontosaurus Chorus
7. Art Brut vs Satan
8. Dark Young Hearts - frYars
9. Let's Change The World With Music - Prefab Sprout
10. Found Wanting - Rob Britton
11. The Bachelor - Patrick Wolf
12. Primary Colours - The Horrors
13. The Sound-Board Breathes - Gyratory System
14. The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman - Sparks
15. Someday All This Could Be Yours (Pt 1) - The Paper Chase
16. The Glare - McAlmont & Nyman
17. God Help The Girl - Stuart Murdoch et al
18. The Duckworth Lewis Method
19. Liebe Ist Fur Alle Da - Rammstein
20. The Fame Monster - Lady Gaga
21. Islands - The Mary Onettes
22. Journal For Plague Lovers - Manic Street Preachers
23. Through The Devil Softly - Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions
24. Until The Earth Begins To Part - Broken Records
25. Forget The Night Ahead - The Twilight Sad
26. Hombre Lobo - Eels
27. Slow Attack - Brett Anderson
28. The Life Of The World To Come - The Mountain Goats
29. 21st Century Man/Achtung Mutha - Luke Haines
30. The Hazards of Love - The Decemberists
31. Fight My Battles For Me - Pagan Wanderer Lu
32. Twitter Tracks - The Streets
33. The Yellow Mini - Jonny Cola & the A-Grades
34. Kicks - 1990s
35. We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River - Richmond Fontaine
36. Pram Town - Darren Hayman & the Secondary Modern
37. The Performance - Shirley Bassey
38. The Resistance - Muse
39. Begone Dull Care - Junior Boys
40. Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle - Bill Callahan

But blazes, haven't there been a lot of disappointments? Franz Ferdinand, Pet Shop Boys and Jarvis were among those who made a brave effort to work with new production teams who ought to have produced the goods, but they all came a cropper by so doing, Morrissey, Depeche Mode, Eminem and Marilyn Manson, meanwhile, were among those content to churn out more of the same old same old - especially disappointing in Manson's case, when the preceding Eat Me Drink Me had been the first sign of any new direction in his work for years. And Springsteen...well, for someone so blue collar he's never really been reliable, but this year's album was still one of his more leaden efforts, and in the theme from The Wrestler contained quite possibly his worst song ever. I don't think he's lost it, you understand - there have been bad albums from him before, and will be again, but always interspersed with greatness.
Nor, I thought, was there really a Song Of The Year, something ubiquitous and inarguable, not even a covert Johnny Boy-style one within certain circles. I would ask whether I missed it, but the nature of a 'Get Ur Freak On' or 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' or 'Umbrella' is that it's unmissable right through at least the summer, and then as the nights close in, as nostalgia for summer, however bad that summer was. I suppose the closest this year came would be the offerings from Cheryl Cole, Lady Gaga and La Roux - but I stumble on not having actually liked any of them, in spite of the first two at least being things which on paper should have been right up my street. Or at least, that was how I felt until Gaga's deluxe reissue of the album which had failed to impress me turned out in fact to be another, better album, trailed with 'Bad Romance', and suddenly she had the material to match the concept, and just as the year stuttered to a close, suddenly it had its anthem. It doesn't normally work this way but then, isn't it a song about precisely that?

Sitting in the gay seat drinking crafty Magners and talking about Ben Goldacre

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:17:27 GMT

You know how sometimes a given venue will have everything you want to see for a few months, and then nothing? I remember when I was at the Windmill most weeks, and yet I don't think I'd been there this year until Saturday. And this having been tempted by Friday's line-up too, but two nights in a row was not going to happen and I knew more people in Saturday's line-up than Friday's, so sorry rhodri. I know augstone managed it, but he's an American, dammit. Anyway, Saturday.I always forget about Maps except when they're running their advent calendar, but they (he?) have pretty good taste. First off, steve586's solo debut. The first track I assume to be the forthcoming solo single, the last is 586's 'We Got Bored' (so much better yelped live than it was on record), but in between it's versions of 18 Carat songs; as is often the way with shows of this kind, the songs work better the more distinct they sound from the band versions, and I'm not just saying that because the iPhone playing the band version of 'Ride The Blue Tiger' as a backing track was interrupted by a voicemail alert (the perils of convergence). Then MJ Hibbett, endearing as ever, though I miss the beginning of his set because I'm hanging with the smokers and a dog, followed by White Witches, who reprise their excellent cover of 'Boys Keep Swinging'. Next up, one of the these days obligatory all-star bands, doing festive covers. And yes, it's not quite December yet, and I'm normally pretty hardline about that, but I'm not totally inflexible and they are pretty good, especially the massed ranks of the evening's acts singing 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' (Rory gets the Bono line). Finally (for me), Pagan Wanderer Lu. I've seen him before and thought he was very good, then completely failed to keep up with him for some reason. It's one man, a laptop, a guitar and the truth, and there's a lot of that about these days; I can't really explain why he's ahead of the back so will instead just note that most of his set is on Spotify.
Headliners Revere sound quite good from their Myspace, good enough that I half-regret not staying for them, but I was flagging and not best placed to get the most out of a new band, and the quantum computing book which had been annoying me on the journey down was now calling to me*. Of course, it turned out to be the kind of flagging where you get home and can't sleep and end up watching iPlayer and tapes until your eyes hurt and you have to force yourself to sleep.
Speaking of which, I watched some 'classic' Doctor Who this weekend - Frontios. I'd never seen it before, but from the Target novelisation, I liked it. In the far future, further than the TARDIS should travel, a fragile human colony has survived the death of Earth - barely. Their failure-proof machines, failed. They cling to life on the planet Frontios, but the soil of the planet is sucking colonists to their deaths...this was a dark and stirring vision.
Except on TV George from Drop the Dead Donkey is the colony's charismatic centrepiece, the sets are appalling and the monsters are worse. The direction's a mess - even scenes which could work on a school stage (Turlough's decision whether to head underground) are taken from the wrong angle and rushed. The whole thing makes you see why Rusty was so scared of alien planets at first, because if they look wrong enough, it undermines the whole enterprise. The 'wobbly set' thing is a cliche, but when it gets bad enough, in the most damaging ways, it does torpedo a story. Or at least, it does unless the story is rock solid, and while writer Christopher Bidmead was responsible for the brilliant Logopolis/Castrovalva pairing, here he seems to have been having quite the off-day.
The (badly) animated new David Tennant story, 'Dreamland', also has critters sucking humans down into the ground, this time in the course of a Roswell story which, as we've come to expect from Phil Ford, goes over ground Who has already covered, but less well. I mention it here chiefly because I wasn't aware it existed until a Facebook friend mentioned it, so some of you might also have been in the dark. Georgia Moffett also features, but not as Jenny. I don't know why her name goes ahead of the credits and Tim Howar (as equally-featured male pseudo-companion for the story) doesn't.

Yesterday whizzerandchips was in town so we all went to the pub, but I'll leave the full reports on that to people who got pictures of the plasticine genitalia.

*Part of the problem could well have been the reading environment. Opposite me sat a man muttering to himself (or rather, an invisible presence in the middle distance) in what sounded like heavily-accented French. On his lap, a vinyl copy of the Shaft soundtrack in a carrier bag, held bolt upright; the bag is occasionally rolled down and then up again, as if in flirtation,

Because a couple of people have requested distraction

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:07:44 GMT

"The Portugese have done what? Ensign, activate War Plan Lemon." Courtesy of alasdair posting the 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia, though given one item on that list is a subsidiary item of another, really it's only 49. I already knew about 12 of the...things is really the only word...which they cover, and a couple of them I don't think are all that, but I doubt anyone could fail to find something splendidly odd and new in there somewhere.

Martin Gore called as expert witness on sadness, alienation, as gamer sues World of Warcraft.

Everything else I had to say, I've already said in Facebook status updates and I don't like duplicating material. Good clouds today, though.

Noughties Retro

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:59:43 GMT

Way behind everyone else, I've just read Vernon God Little and...well, it's a lot better than most of the dross that gets anywhere near a Booker, clearly. It's funny, it has a plot which slightly gets away from it but is nonetheless recognisable as a comedy adventure, it has moments of real power and insight. But, the set-up is fundamentally untrue. The way in which Vernon, the survivor, is scapegoated for a high school massacre - that doesn't happen, does it? I'm not going to claim expertise on every school shooting but this story is about one of the ones which really catch the public imagination - so we're talking Columbine, Virginia Tech, the major ones. And in both of those cases it was taken as read that the dead kids are the guilty kids. The need for a living scapegoat on which Pierre hangs his plot, doesn't exist (or at least not in the sense of a single schoolchild - people blame Hollywood, or Grand Theft Auto, or Marilyn Manson). And he's got the verve that the book still just about works in a way that something similarly flawed in concept like Asimov's 'Jokester' doesn't. But still, that makes it at best a flawed masterpiece, not the best novel of its year.

And partly because there are so many books I haven't got round to, I may have mentioned before that I don't reread much. Well, not prose, anyway - comics and poetry, more so, because they tend to be quicker. On Monday I broke this habit; John Crowley's 'Great Work of Time' had been bugging me for a while, I think perhaps since I read Stross' 'Palimpsest' (which is about the same length, has some of the same themes, and I generally feel may be influenced by it - or even if it isn't, in my head they're companion pieces). I only read the Crowley a little under two years ago, and I did pretty much remember it, but still...rereading didn't feel like a waste of time. I may do more of this. Though at 70-odd pages, obviously this was a very different proposition to a whole novel.

Thought I'd got another Audrey Hepburn classic taped, but of course because The Children's Hour was on late, that meant some arse in the corner of the screen was gesticulating and totally ruining it. OK, she only took up about a sixth of the screen rather than the quarter used by the red-sweatered gimp on Colonel Blimp that time, but still enough to make it unwatchable. Is this why the apparent villain of the group in C4's new disability comedy-drama Cast Offs is the deaf one (I mainly watched because the writers had Skins and Thick of It credits and, while it's not in that league, it's pretty good)? So I ended up with Black Book instead. ~~A hilarious account of Dylan Moran's drunken escapades in the Resistance~~ A depressing bloody film and no mistake. Lest my posts on Hepburn and Nabokov suggest I always start with the obvious work, I was watching this subtitled Verhoeven film having never seen Robocop or Basic Instinct - but, comparing it to Total Recall and Starship Troopers I am forced to conclude that Verhoeven being realistic is far sillier than Verhoeven doing OTT SF. What could have been a claustrophobic little tale of a Jewish woman sleeping with a high-ranking Nazi (played by Sebastian Koch, who seems rather to specialise in such roles) to help her Resistance friends gets increasingly silly as double-cross follows double-cross while she takes far too long to realise that she should be trusting nobody as a general rule, and in particular not the obvious villain of the piece.

Mark Z Danielewski's Difficult Second Album Syndrome. Also, weekend

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:07:51 GMT

Even though I got 11+ hours of sleep last night, I don't feel like I've assimilated this weekend. En route to Black Plastic, I saw Neighbourhood Watch signs warning that areas were protected by Smart Water, which just gave me the Waters of Mars fear. The night itself was ace (even if I was a little surprised when, though lots of people were dancing to Kenickie's 'Magnatron', an awful lot of them asked me what it is. But then, it was always an oddly out-of-place song). The problem arose when I went for pub lunch the next day and essentially started drinking again far too soon. And then carried on, on and off, around the filming of 'The Oxford Dons', for far too long. One interesting development of which was the discovery of a new booze. Now, clearly one is always discovering new spirits and liqeurs because the world has a near-limitless variety of foodstuffs which can be weaponised. But a new pint-type beverage, that's rare, and yet this year I've encountered two - first alcoholic ginger beer, and now Faro, which augstone had brought back from Belgium (so it does have a purpose after all) and which smells like beer but tastes of tea. Yum.
This may be why I woke up disastrously late for my Sunday plans, only to discover that they'd been cancelled anyway (a mercy, under the circumstances), and then achieved very little with the day except confirming that Spider-Man 3 is even worse than I'd expected. Bruce Campbell's Frenchman is about the only redeeming feature.

A lot of people I know have read Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves and so far as I'm aware, most agree that it's one of the most terrifying books ever written, its experimental textual tricks working perfectly with the central tale(s) to produce an unease which really feels like it's coming out of the pages to get you.
And yet, nobody much seems to talk about his follow-up, Only Revolutions. I picked it up early in 2007, thought it looked a bit forbidding, and only got around to it this year. And, well, when I thought it looked forbidding, I didn't know the half of it.
It's subtitled 'a novel'. Which is necessary, because otherwise one could easily mistake it for a free verse epic, or perhaps something like Jeff Noon's Cobralingus. Here's the opening - or one of them, but more on that later. I'm not going to attempt the tabbing, but bear in mind, this looks more justified than the original:
Samsara! Samarra!
Grand!
I can walk away
from anything.
Everyone loves
the Dream but I kill it.
Atlas Mountain Cedars gush
over me: - Up Boogaloo!
I leap free this spring.
On fire. How my hair curls.
I'll destroy the World.
Oh, and all the letter Os are in yellow. As is the ribbon bookmark. You read eight pages of this and then revolve the book, start reading it from the back and upside down, where there's an alternate version of the story, with green Os and ribbon. The yellow (theoretically gold) story is Hailey's, the green Sam. They're in love. They drive an ever-changing car, its make and model different each time it's mentioned. Where Hailey's story has plants, Sam's always has animals; he's more romantic than her, too. There are other differences, from minor variants in word choice upwards, but also similarities: both of them always write 'us' in capitals, US (because they somehow represent America?) and 'alone' and 'always' become 'allone' and 'allways'. There's a power to the poetry, often - sometimes it just becomes a series of sounds, sometimes the book actually tries to have a plot and then it gets bogged down (the sequence in the St Louis Club/Grill/Cafe &c is especially wearing). At its best, it really sings:
"- By something wide which feels close.
Open but feels closed. Lying weirdly
across US. Between US. Where we're
closest, where we touch, where we're one.
Somehow continuing on separately.
- Hold me tighter."
And the two versions of the story make a sort of sense, the book revolving like the wheels of all those automobiles. But, that's not all, because each story has sidebars of something else. One runs up to, and one runs away from, Nov 22 1963. Each contains historical snippets for a given day, edited down to near-incomprehensibility. So:
March 4 1976
Pan Am's negligence.
Nigerian BS Dimka
arrested.
Tokyo's 4,000 workers.
Frank Church.
- our greatest foreign
policy problem is our division at.
- and pervasive feer.
Patty Hearst guilty.
Jorge Rafael Videla over
Isabel Martinez de Peron."
'Over' always signifies victory - in election, in sport - and people always 'go' rather than die. I don't know what the point of these sidebars is. They make it hard to follow the two parallel versions of the main story, but they contain something resonant just often enough that I don't feel I can skip them.
This might be another masterpiece. It might just be an experiment too far. Certainly, I think I'm going to wait for someone else to take the first dip before I attempt his third novel.

Sobriety tastes metallic

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:02:44 GMT

Stringer Bell is going to be in Branagh's Thor film. And we already knew Titus Pullo was involved, probably as Volstagg. I SAY THEE YAY. And speaking of things HBO, while the final Generation Kill did editorialise a little, while I don't think it's ever going to be as beloved as The Wire, that was an extremely good series - maybe even more so than The Wire it did a brilliant job of humanising the characters you hated, showing why they were such utter dicks, with even Godfather getting his moment at the end.

To my amazement, the proposed internet laws in the Queen's Speech were even worse than expected. If you've not been keeping up with the minutiae: the Government commissioned a report, Digital Britain, on how to reconcile the interests of the creative industries with those of net users. This report said that while unlicensed file-sharing was indeed rather naughty, internet disconnection was too draconian a penalty even for the guilty, never mind how many innocents would also be punished (Mum and Dad for the kids' filesharing, or a whole town for one illicit movie). So obviously, because we know how the government regards facts as dangerously subversive (just ask Professor Nutt), Peter Mandelson elbowed the relevant minister out of the spotlight, countermanded the report his own government had commissioned (they obviously didn't appoint a tame enough investigator, Hutton must have been busy), and countermanded anything sensible in it to put three-strikes disconnection back on the agenda. And, we now learn, so much more.
This in a world where Rupert Murdoch, until recently New Labour's bestest pal, talks about putting a pay wall around the websites of his various ghastly papers while stealing content from Edgar Wright. But you can bet that even if that happened two more times, even under the new rules, News International wouldn't get disconnected. In spite of how even musicians who don't make nearly as much money as they should would rather be ripped off online than live in a country which thinks disconnection is acceptable. The only consolation is that the relevant bill is profoundly unlikely to make it through before Goooooordon Brooown loses the next election. Not that I expect the other flavour of scum to propose anything better, you understand, but sometimes delay is the best you can hope for. After all, the horse might talk.

The Black Casebook collects a dozen strange Batman stories from 1951-1964, which is the period when the comic was as stupid as the old Adam West TV series, but without having to worry about the limited budget. So, Batman could be turned into a hulking monster, or find himself on an alien world called Zur-En-Arrh - which, if you've read Grant Morrison's run on the character, should explain why this collection has been put out, and why I was reading it. He contributes an introduction (although one which disagrees in some respects with the contents - he mentions 'The Rainbow Batman' when the book instead has 'The Rainbow Creature'. All the campy old elements are here - Bat-Mite and Ace the Bat-Hound - and by no sane standard are the stories or the art any good. Even the ideas are not so much "mad, brilliant ideas" as half-formed and hurries, born of desperation. Mainly it serves as a testament to Morrison's own talents, going back over the history of Batman and managing to find resonance even in these stupidest of stories which most modern writers would prefer to forget about.
Also, I know it's hardly novel to suggest Batman and Robin came across as a bit gay back in the day, but this book opens with 'A Partner For Batman' where you really can't avoid it. Robin has broken his leg just as Batman is about to train up a new Batman-type for an unnamed European country. Except Robin is convinced this is just a cover story and Batman wants to drop him in favour of Wingman! Cue such lines as, while Batman carries the injured Robin like a bride, "Batman's doing his best to sound gay. But I can tell his heart isn't in it!". And, from one onlooker, "A man is better than a kid any day!". Poor discarded twink.

Haven't had the energy or the funds to be out and about so much this week; even daytime wanders have been a bit sub-optimal, like yesterday when Highbury was deserted and instead of relishing this, I just wondered if it was anything to do with how very tentacly those red-leaved plants look once the leaves are finally gone. But, this just makes me look forward to tonight's Black Plastic all the more. Makes the weekend feel like a weekend, something which can rather slide when one is away from the habit of the working week.

Ever get the feeling a plot is stalking you?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:03:07 GMT

It's almost fifteen years since I was first introduced to Audrey Hepburn with, what else, Breakfast at Tiffany's. Since then I've seen a lot of her films, some of them classics (Charade is my favourite) and some less so (I couldn't make it past the first 20 minutes of My Fair Lady). But not until now have I seen her second most famous film, Roman Holiday. The timing works rather well, making it a companion piece to Waters of Mars - two stories about circumscribed power and the degree to which duty can be avoided, two stories which are going somewhere obvious and then throw you in the final 20 minutes. But then, it also seems like a very ahead-of-its-time story with the princess as a proto-Britney (drugged up to help her keep to a punishing schedule, she goes off the net and cuts off ~~all~~ her hair, only to end up palling around with someone plotting to sell her story). Except in other ways it really shows its age* - all that manoeuvring to conceal the fact that someone's taking photos! Admittedly I remember an episode of Frasier which did the same, but even at the time I thought that was a pretty nonsensical episode.
And it should go without saying that Hepburn, in all three iterations of her role, is delightful. Look, got through that whole thing without using the G-word!
Later that evening, flicking through an anthology I picked up years back, I was reading a Keith Roberts story I didn't know which again, felt like Roman Holiday, but this time from another angle - the brief romance that cannot be consummated or continued because they come from different worlds. Except this one was about a hedge witch and a scarecrow (the collection also contained Terry Pratchett's 'Troll Bridge', which I've read before and loved but which is even sadder read in the knowledge that, like Cohen the Barbarian, Pratchett himself now knows he hasn't got so long. Why haven't his short stories been properly collected? Surely there'd be a market for them).
The next day, in the Conan collection I've been reading on and off for ages, I reach the centrepiece, 'People of the Black Circle'. The plot of which? A moment of connection between Conan and a queen, but they can't stay together because different lives and all that. Same as Roman Holiday, though admittedly with more about how the "elemental woman" takes over from the Queen when she gets a thrill from how easily Conan kidnaps her. Also, can't see the massive bloodshed, giant snake or necromantic rape scene really fitting into an Audrey Hepburn film (though Robin and Marian wasn't all that far off...
As a control to prove it's not just me getting obsessional, since last posting I have also watched something like a whole season of Invader Zim and I did not identify the same plot in any of that. Although it was, clearly, brilliant. SPACE MEAT.

More on the Prisoner remake: "The catchphrase and key theme of the original show was Number Six’s weekly decree, “I am not a number, I am a free man!” In an interview in last week’s New York Times, the writer of the remake said he felt the need to modify that sentiment into something more moderate, less individualist, more… community-minded." DO NOT WANT.
The article also has some interesting stuff about what went wrong, for similar reasons, with the Judge Dredd film.

*Something else weirdly dated: Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader For A Day. If you've read Freakonomics, he's the American-Indian (as in ethnically from India, not redskin) sociologist who spent years hanging with Chicago gangs, with things winding down by 1996. His fuller account of his experiences is pretty interesting, and some details of that seem oddly out-of-time too, like the lack of mobiles. But what really intrigued me is how many ghetto kids he meets seem to have no idea whatsoever what an Indian is (and some of the local cops are no better). He's initially accused of being a spy for a Mexican gang, other people keep calling him an Arab, such as do grasp he's an Indian start talking about Geronimo and Custer...and not that I know Chicago projects all that well, but I bet after two decades of The Simpsons, Mohinder in Heroes and such, the people there would at least have some conception of an Indian.

My indie hand tattooed pop all across its brother's fist

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:16:00 GMT

Saturday night: a double bill of bands whose videos I've been in, so I was expecting to get mobbed by Youtube enthusiasts but people just seemed to watch the bands instead. I suppose they are both ace, so fair enough. If further proof were needed, I heard Loyd Grossman tell Brontosaurus Chorus "that was really good" in his actual Loyd Grossman voice. Didn't stick around for his band, though. Watching Loyd Grossman's pub rock band is a bit like shagging the Queen - worth it for the pub anecdote if you've got nothing else on, but if there's another offer you'd enjoy, it's just perverse. Of course, that did also mean missing Mr Solo but hey, it's only a fortnight since I saw him. The Queen-shagging analogy doesn't extend to that bit, I don't think. But off to Don't Stop Moving for pop we went. Whenever I go to two things with music in one night, however varied the remits, there will always be at least one song played at both, and this time it was 'Uptown Top Ranking'. Not the Black Box Recorder version, alas. In between playing 'Identify What The Own-Brand Confectionery Is Imitating' (and usually very well, both as in I guessed them all and they were all indistinguishable in taste from their more famous prototypes) I danced rather a lot, including twice to Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance'. I think that, helped by the Camden Head's pleasingly overpowered soundsystem, I may be on the verge of being worn down/won over.

On Friday I wasn't going to go out because of the storm, but then it hit me - that's precisely the reason to go out, because hearing the great wind batter against the windows is fun but seeing the leaves lashed by air and water, the hurrying shadows from the Fullback's smoking pagoda is so much better. The best moment came when one gust caught a pub table umbrella, sending it pirouetting high into the air - and then plummeting clumsily down the central well, like the suicide of a ballerina attempting one final gesture against gravity. Except obviously I didn't say that at the time, going instead with 'oh my god' followed by 'sack the juggler'.

Thursday was the release party for the new issue of Phonogram, except it's not out yet because of some printing cock-up, but I did end up with an issue anyway. Don't bother trying to follow that. The point is, I think this is my favourite issue of The Singles Club. I said earlier on in the series, and azureskies notes from the other end here, that with this prismatic run of individual experiences of a night, it's not so much about the craft of the comic, because that runs at a consistently high standard; it's about which issues are your experiences, your people, your bands. And of all the music so far (yes, even 'Atomic') my favourite is the Long Blondes. This issue reminds me why, while also reminding me why I took them off my MP3 player - "My life is neither as good or bad as a Long Blondes song, but I have the sense and understanding that perhaps...well, perhaps one day it may be". More so even than the work of Greg Dulli, they are music to do bad things to. And yet after this issue, the first album is back on the MP3 player.
(Also out this week from Gillen and (partially) McKelvie, S.W.O.R.D. which Gillen correctly describes as His Girl Friday in space. Top fun, but I think I may enjoy it even more once the obligatory Dark Reign tie-in is out of the way because for all that it was a timely and smart direction for the Marvel Universe, I am starting to get a leetle tired of it)

The House Beautiful is having the Bathroom Slightly Grotty renovated, which while it's not before time, is mildly inconvenient in the meantime, especially what with me not needing to be at a job during the day or anything because of the whole 'epochal depression' business. Meaning that by the time I'd normally be surfacing in the morning, today I had already showered, dressed and watched Hard Candy. I remember this being much praised at the time - a hard-hitting but thoughtful and taut drama about paedophilia. Mainly, though, I just found myself thinking that now To Catch A Predator does the entrapment bit for real, TV doesn't exactly need this, and that as a two-hander which mostly takes place in one house, it would work much better as a play.
Also, I totally failed to register that the male lead was the guy who played Nite Owl.

Doctor Who, of course

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:55:39 GMT

I hadn't been all that excited about Waters of Mars. I try my best to avoid spoilers, but I'd still encountered enough to make me very, very excited about Tennant's final outings as the Doctor and the Christmas regeneration. Especially after the lacklustre Planet of the Dead, this just seemed like another contractual obligation, a roadbump in the way. Until I saw the last trailer with the Doctor telling the crew of Bowie Base One that he was very sorry, but this was a fixed point, and he had to let them die. Then, suddenly, I was excited. And for two thirds of the episode that was what we seemed to get - and it was wonderful, if deeply stressful. To be honest, I wasn't that concerned about the crew or the soggy zombies after them - good effects and all, but they were there to die. It was the Doctor I felt for, his mingled duty and curiosity, his sorrow at his own powerlessness. Not that I ever felt he was under threat, past one shout of 'Get your suit on, Doctor!' when the water was running in.
And then the bait and switch, and "The Laws of Time are mine and they will obey me", and I'm too staggered to punch the air but oh my life, this is amazing. This is the route to the godhead hinted at from time to time, especially in the Moffat stories (I half-expected Gadget to open the TARDIS door by clicking its manipulators). I always love it when a hero throws off the constraints of mortality and becomes a god, and this was up there with Kal El's 'Mother, Father, I love you, but you were wrong. I am no man. I am Superman."
Except...why has he taken them back to Earth in the same time zone? Why not hide them in the past or the future - I expected it to be somewhere out in the depths of space and time where a great-descendant of Adelaid Brooke could meet the originator of it all, John Wyndham's Outward Urge (a definite influence) meets DC One Million. When Adelaide doesn't feel up to sharing the Doctor's responsibility, why not just nip in, get rid of the body then go get the other two and take them on a long trip? You're not out of control, Doctor. You did the right thing. No need to emote, now go save the Time Lords. And fuck the Ood, they're not all that.
None of which is to deny that I'm now even more psyched up about The End of Time than I was before I got excited about Waters of Mars.

Not the only Who showing at the moment, of course, because there's also The Sarah Jane Adventures. Except, half of this series has been written by the same Phil Ford who collaborated on Waters of Mars, and yet all his teatime stories have all been utter drivel. Yes, you can say 'it's only a kid's show' - and that's precisely what Ford must do, because every one of his stories has been an exercise in dumb 'will this do?', as against fine work by all the other writers. But the worst of the lot was last week's outing, Mona Lisa's Revenge. To spoiler you less than the trailer does: Clyde, the rebellious one of Sarah Jane's kid sidekicks, is suddenly revealed to have always been a gifted artist. So much so that he has won a competition (with some really bad graffiti-style girls-with-guns work) and the class have been invited to see the unveiling of the Mona Lisa, on its first loan outside the Louvre. A loan to a gallery run by a man who was apparently barred from the Louvre for his obsession with the Mona Lisa, so that obviously makes perfect sense. Except, oh noes, the Mona Lisa has come to life! Where she is played by someone who looks nothing like the Mona Lisa, can't act, and has apparently been chosen just because somebody thought it would be jolly funny if for no apparent reason, the Mona Lisa had a Northern accent. Now, all of this is pretty poor in and of itself. But what makes it really special is that the Mona Lisa has already been key to a Doctor Who story. Not some pissy little book or audio or whatever, either, but one of the best stories in the original series' TV history, the Douglas Adams/Tom Baker/Lalla Ward classic City of Death. Ford is writing for a spin-off while either never having seen this story, being too stupid to remember it, or being arrogant enough that he thinks he can go clodhopping all over it for some cheap laughs which don't even come off.
But hey, at least he's not writing the series finale.
Oh, and while we've had occasional updates as to what original kid sidekick Maria has been up to since she moved to America, her dad, nice Alan Jackson, can now be seen as priapic, indolent English professor Matt Beer in Channel 4's so-so new comedy pilot Campus. Which is quite disturbing.

Chance

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:57:23 GMT

It can't be good for Camelot that the week the price of Euromillions goes up by a third is also the week after the biggest UK wins ever (and why on Earth did the winners all go public? Surely they gain nothing from so doing, while making themselves targets for begging letters at best and kidnappers at worst?). Obviously, when you look at the maths then that extra 50p is a negligible investment and the prize is still more than ten million pounds. But, if you look at the maths, you don't play the lottery. It's all about what seems like a tiny enough sum of money to drop in order to take the chance of the fates smiling on you. And two quid, I think, crosses that line, especially in a week when the fates look so stingy compared to last week.

E4's 'young offenders get superpowers' show Misfits is off to a promising start; between this and No Heroics it looks like, on TV as in comics, it needs us to show the Yanks how to do superheroes properly. Though worryingly, the two shows look set to semi-crossover next week with an appearance by Nathan Barley/The Hotness as a rapey policeman. If the police getting younger is a sign of ageing, how much more so when it's TV police being played by the erstwhile epitome of youth foolishness? Like No Heroics, Misfits also looks to have a nice line in in-jokes, with the first episode based around the Wertham Community Centre.

Inez Holden "became a great friend of George Orwell, whose first meeting with Anthony Powell she engineered in 1941. A dinner party involving Orwell and HG Wells, in whose shed she once lived, was less successful. Wells afterwards sent Orwell a note urging him to 'read my early works, you sh1t'."
- from the end credits of Bright Young People

Good Night, And Good Luck: good film. In its loving (and very cigarette-heavy) recreation of the not-so-distant past it has something of Mad Men about it, as well as sharing one cast member - but a lot less of the moral ambiguity. The story of Edward R Murrow's campaign against McCarthyism is one of those rare, straightforward tales of a hero, a man who was in the right place at the right time, did the right thing, and succeeded. A brilliant cast, not all of whom I expected (it was George Clooney's project so I knew he'd be there, but Robert Downey Jr surprised me, and lots of the others are people you recognise as having given good work before but can't quite place). It did leave me wondering, though, how McCarthy ever managed to be taken seriously enough to start his reign of terror - they use archive footage rather than an actor, and he comes across as an unhallowed blend of Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Fred West.
The story of Murrow's triumph is framed by a speech he gives when winning some award or other, in which he expresses his fears for the future of television, worries whether information will survive or whether consolation and distraction will prevail. Which made it rather awkward that it screened at the same time as Generation Kill, a show whose truth I think he would have loved if he'd been able to follow it, meaning I had to use the bugginess that is 4OD to soldier through my weekly dose of Iraq clusterfvcks.

The one upside to the demise of the Observer Music Monthly (reported on a CMU update which doesn't seem to be on their website) is that at least it's taking Observer Woman Monthly down with it.

You are the generation that bought more shoes

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:08:28 GMT

It always used to be - perhaps still is if you catch me off guard - that asked when I'd like to live, I'd instantly reply 'the twenties'. Yes, as a rich person, obviously - just like anyone who thinks we've never had it so good is obviously thinking of themselves rather than a Third World peasant, just like nobody ever said Rome and meant as a slave (well, except maybe a few serious submissives). But a while back a doubt dawned and has been niggling ever since - were the twenties rich any different to the arses clogging the gossip mags I spurn? Do we just romanticise them through distance, the same way classic pirates seem sexy while having your yacht seized by Somalis with automatic weaponry is distinctly less so? DJ Taylor's excellent Bright Young People - The Rise and Fall of a Generation: 1918-1940 is doing nothing to convince me otherwise. Yes, in America the gilded twenties produced some artists of genuine stature - the Fitzgeralds, Dorothy Parker - but over here we mostly ended up with never-was-es like Stephen Tennant and Brian Howard, always just about to write masterpieces which somehow never quite materialised. Of the books written from and about the scene which did appear, most are now only ever read as research for social histories like this one, and even those which survive for wider public attention - which basically means Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies - are still principally known for reflexive reasons just as they were at the time; like their subjects, we read them to be at once scandalised and fascinated by the thinly-veiled documentary of the times*. Times which only produced these books. Which we only read because...and so on. If Waugh had kept his powder dry on the topic until Brideshead years later (assuming he'd somehow supported himself in the meantime and not become another Tennant or Howard), would literature be much the poorer?
But mostly, what was written about them was the gossip mags, the disgust/obsession of the middle-market rags, the same we see nowadays. "The reader's curiosity, in fact, was almost bovine. It went only so far. It wanted, above all, to be reassured that the grass it ate was grass, that the people presented for inspection, whoever they might be, were worth reading about." Consider the junkie Brenda Dean Paul, the radio news following her escapades with the same urgent irrelevance as Amy Winehouse or Pete Doherty gets from the websites and tabloids. And never mind Winehouse, she couldn't even claim such nugatory cultural achievements as Doherty, being an 'actress' in the loosest possible sense (but then, she did exist in a time before ITV drama, so that at least could have changed).
Understand: it's not Taylor taking this line - he laments the decline of the Bright Young scene into a parade of wannabes and ever-increasing efforts at novelty, but the wondering if there was ever anything there in the first place is just me. Similarly, the modern parallels are if anything underplayed. Though the book being a couple of years old, there's one at least which couldn't possibly have spooked him like it did me. Describing a Punch satire of the scene:
"Losing sight of Lady Gaga for half an hour, the interloper eventually finds her with her arm round the waist of 'a young heavyweight in horn-rims dressed as a baby', listening to a hollow-eyed girl ina tutu and an opera hat who is singing a song with the refrain 'It's terribly thrilling to be wicked'."
Of course, counterpoint all this with the worries of parents about how the Bright Young People were wasting their time, refusing to acknowledge the serious side of life and you realise - if they had, they'd still have been wasting their time. What else could they have done? Gone into business and been wiped out by the Crash. Gone into finance, and caused it. Gone into politics and achieved about as much at the rather duller masquerades of the League of Nations as the Bright Young People did at theirs which at least had plenty of cocktails - or stayed in domestic politics and as like as not been damned forever for going along with appeasement. As a wise man once said: "Yes, you may be wasting your life. But it's your life to waste. Hell, no matter what you chose to do, you were wasting it anyway. And that you have the chance to doom yourself in such a way...well, that's glorious." Or as an even wiser man put it, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". The good times are good times because of what they become as a half-memory which itself becomes an aspiration. Sometimes it's better not to meet your heroes, not even in a group biography.

*On the other hand, while I rather like the look of The Noughties Were Sh1t ("This blog will chart the worst of the noughties. The rubbish new genres, the horrible new trends, the idiot popstars, the dullard celebrities, the pitiful movements and the squandered promise of a rubbish generation. Think of it as a process of truth and reconciliation. We must make sure that the fucking noughties are never allowed to happen again"), I'm conflicted in the awareness that even aside from having myself had a pretty good decade - I may be a victim of the economic bust having never really got the benefits of the boom, and yet compared to a decade ago I live in a much better place with more friends and more avenues of entertainment - that site is the work of one of the best bands of the decade. A band whose driving force is disgust with that decade. And so the contradiction spirals on.

Another week without early mornings

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:16:38 GMT

Sorry to everyone whose birthdays and gigs I didn't make on Saturday, had a birthday of someone I'd not seen in far too long to attend in deepest Tufnell Park. The place started off very full on account of footballism, so we ended up in one of those internal pub crawl situations where every time a bigger and better table comes clear, you dash for it, sometimes holding on to the original table too, until eventually you realise you've over-expanded and cannot sustain your conquests. As one friend said, "like the Japanese empire in World War II - but without the rape camps".
On Friday I went to see xandratheblue and retro_geek DJ the Doe Face Lilian gig in Kilburn. Disappointingly, Doe Face Lilian have still yet to start coming on stage in a Trojan horse for a 'Doe Face Ilium' visual pun which I would appreciate enormously, but the girls played Swimmer One and The Ark, so I was happy. And yesterday, an autumnal Essex Tubewalk followed by local drinks which I had to leave early when I realised I could no longer feel my toes. Either it's the end of the sitting outside season, or I need some new socks.

There's a new album out by a bit of a cult figure who combines utter self-obsession and a bit of a knack for losing his audience, with a clear need for adulation. But Robbie Williams has had quite enough press lately, it's the new Luke Haines which is puzzling me. As we settle in for another winter of discontent, his Seventies obsession suddenly seems strangely prescient - but because that would make things too easy, he also has to include a three-piece spoken word tale of modern art pseuds and trepanation. And simply to fly in the face of the received wisdom on double albums, he's separated 21st Century Man and Achtung Mutha on to two CDs even though they'd easily fit on one (with a silent track between them to enforce the break). Bless his wilfully perverse little heart.

I've been reading Doctor Who books again, having ground to a halt a while back from the sheer repetitive grind of the Sabbath epic (in brief: after the Time Wars, an amnesiac Doctor is up against a human with mysterious backers who has set up as a new Time Lord, and is attempting to condense the multiverse down into one timeline). Decided to take a break from those and instead read Spiral Scratch, an attempt to give the Sixth Doctor a proper send-off what with him having had the worst regeneration scene in the show's history. And...oh dear, it's all about the multiverse again, and a villain trying to kill off alternate timelines. And yes, this coincidence in my reading order is hardly the writer's fault, but multiple versions of the same character is such an easy thing to do badly, and at the same time I was reading Charlie Stross' 'Palimpsest' where it's done so well, and the Buzzcocks references scattered through this are just tiresome given I was always more of a Magazine man, and...gah, basically. There are moments which make me feel like I didn't totally waste my time - glimpses of Evelyn and Frobisher, the sheer love for the Sixth Doctor which comes through - but mostly it's exactly the sort of second-rate fanservice people expect from the books, and it's such a shame there were so many like that in between the Lance Parkins and Paul Cornells and Lawrence Mileses of the enterprise.

Cool guys don't look at explosions

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:38:26 GMT

Sometimes we all get anxious - if time is money then it explains how time and money can get wrapped into a sort of unified field theory of worry which then starts pulling in everything else, however outlandish. And London, being not half so stony-hearted as some have made her out to be, tries her best to cheer you up, pulling aside the curtain so you catch sight of side-streets you've never seen before in all the times you've gone down that road, but you're so convinced that you're in a hurry that you mark them for future investigation, so she makes them more and more enticing until finally you crack and trot down there and suddenly, even though it looks like a normal enough little street, the light and the birdsong and the breeze all come together and counteract that knot of troubles and everything's alright again. And you carry on along your way, lighter of spirit, and accomplish your missions and find time to drop in on the British Museum too, where while looking for something else entirely you find a statue of the Remover of Obstacles which contains at least enough of his essence to convey the appropriate sentiment of "Hey, we got this! Relax." And you know that something will turn up - it always does.

Went for another walk later on, to take in the fireworks - and I've no idea what most modern Britons are celebrating these days, whether it's an expression of anarchist tendencies which I can hardly begrudge even if they have chosen an iffy figurehead, or if they just like blowing sh1t up. Personally, commemorating the defeat and brutal execution of the seventeenth century's answer to al Qaeda still works for me, but whatever it's nominally about, the lights, and the bangs, and the smell of gunpowder in the air..it's magical in itself. And this year there was no magic in the air on Hallowe'en, in spite of all the witches and vampires on the streets, but it's stupid to be purist about these things, for the nature of the magical is not to be constrained by formulae - if it were just another science then what would be the point?

In spite of not having to fit myself around a working day at present, I still find myself fitting more or less to a standard diurnal schedule - most of the time. Last night was one of the exceptions, charging drunkenly around Youtube looking for gems I half-remembered or never caught, like this Whipping Boy video, and making the sad discovery that 'Stranger Than Fiction' by Destroy All Monsters is not half so good as I remember. I also watched '£45 zombie movie' Colin; obviously the same thing that made me keen to see it (zombie Al!) is the thing which most hampers my suspension of disbelief, but even so it has some haunting moments. I worry, though, that telling the story from the zombie's point of view, making the zombie-killers such unsympathetic characters, will be very counterproductive come the zombie apocalypse.

Other items of interest:
- Grant Morrison and Stephen Fry are pitching something for BBC Scotland.
- A rather entertaining drubbing of Florence & the Machine.
- "Presenter Lauren Laverne has signed up to write a series of novels for teenage girls." Anyone else remember when that news would have been terribly exciting?

November rain

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:03:57 GMT

Anyone else been on the new Overground trains yet? Nice and spacious and all, but what's with the weird handles on the windows? I spent a minute trying various methods of opening them before being told by another passenger that they didn't open - and I remain unsure whether she knew this from another source, or had just been defeated by them herself. If she was right, then why do they look like they open when they don't? Must we be taunted so?
Anyway, I was aboard for my second trip (this year/ever) to Kew Gardens, which has the advantage not only of being so massive that you'll never cover it all in one visit, but of changing with the seasons so that even the bits you did see and love in summer are beautiful in entirely different ways come autumn.

Up is, as everyone has said, heartbreakingly beautiful. The effect of the ascending house works on a primal level, and the first twenty minutes is not only terribly, terribly sad - it explains to children how old people happen, something which always puzzled me at that age. Plus, the moral in so far as there is one is pretty much terrifying - not only that 'life is what happens while you're making other plans' but that, even if you do complete those plans, the result won't satisfy you because humanity doesn't do satisfaction. So it's perhaps appropriate to note that this is not the perfect film I keep seeing it hailed as. In particular, there's an odd moment-by-moment indecision as to whether it operates by cartoon physics or real world (or at least, adventure film) physics, meaning I didn't always know what consequence to expect from an action, how seriously to take any given jeopardy.

Back in the day, Doctor Who had a bit of a tendency to spoiler itself with the episode titles; it's difficult to be excited by the end-of-episode-one reveal of the villain behind events when the story is called Attack of the Cybermen or Revelation of the Daleks. The Sarah Jane Adventures has now managed to get itself into a similar situation more obliquely, in that if the story title includes Sarah Jane Smith's full name, it always seems to indicate the same adversary. Still great to see him facing up to the Doctor last week, though.

Still recovering slightly from a nightlife-heavy weekend. Poptimism was down to core personnel, on top of which strangers came - and not ones who wanted to dance which would have been grand, but ones who just sat there looking like disgruntled darts players. Nonetheless, an enjoyable night. Prom Night, on the other hand, was swarming with people who were very much on the right wavelength - Jareth from Labyrinth and the disembowelled nerd were particularly impressive, but at ever turn there was another great costume. I felt almost underdressed, particularly since a year without practice meant it was midnight before I really remembered how to wear my cloak to best effect, but I still danced until my feet hurt, and then some.
Out on the streets, though, Hallowe'en falling on a Saturday seemed to mean amateur hour - I saw a few zombie/vampire/witch hybrids who seemed to have been taking tips from Alan Partridge, and some inexplicable blackface (but orc black not black person black, so far as one could tell. Are chimney sweeps spooky?). Also, a puzzling preponderance of Beetlejuices.
And on Sunday, the PopArt Bowie special. Nightbeast aka The Sex Tourists aka White Witches and Jonny Cola both did fine Bowie covers, Mr Solo didn't bother but hey, he's Mr Solo, he can do what the Hell he likes, even bring along an alter-Devant band with aliases of the Detective, the Czar and the Inquisition. The night ended with the PopArt Allstars doing a whole set of Bowie covers for which, on balance, you had to be there.

Films in which the late Heath Ledger shares the lead role

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:20:15 GMT

There are plenty of films with two actors playing the same character - usually an older or a younger version of the star. But I can't think of many with four plus actors in the same part. This week, I saw two, and in both cases one of the actors sharing was Heath Ledger.
I was interested in I'm Not There even before I eventually fell for Bob Dylan as a performer rather than just a songwriter. Because biopics bore me so easily - always the same few variations on the old arc - and because this was Todd Haynes, who already did the oblique approach so well with Bowie and Iggy and the rest in Velvet Goldmine. And the two films share more than a little: the transfer of power between different avatars of Dylan reminds me of the green jewel in the earlier film; there's a journalist out to unveil origins, though here it's not the backbone of the plot; above all, there's the question of whether music can change the world, and what happens to the musician if it can't. But the big difference is that Haynes clearly never felt betrayed by Dylan like he did by Bowie. He loves all his Dylans equally - even if, like most people, I was left a little cold by the Richard Gere outlaw Dylan. The others, though...I loved having Batman and the Joker both play the same part (see, Alan? 'The Killing Joke' did have some external resonance after all), then sharing it with the Virgin Queen. And did they know when they cast this, or Bright Star, that Ben Whishaw would be playing both Dylan and Keats, that old lit-crit cliche given (rather handsome) life. So much truer than the standard biopic, and probably not even that much less factual. Though I say that as someone who knows very little about Dylan's life - just enough to wince when he buys a motorcycle.
I'm Not There was planned that way. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was not, but you'd never guess it. I have no idea what was changed in the script, but one can almost suspect that Terry Gilliam, so used to being shafted by whatever cosmic entity it is that likes messing with him, was filming in such an order that he could work around the loss of Ledger. Which would normally mean that instead Christopher Plummer would have died, or maybe Tom Waits, or the lad from Red Riding would have been eaten by foxes or something, but just this once the stupid obstacle in Gilliam's way was one that he could work around. There aren't half some queasy moments, scenes with Ledger's character that gain a whole new resonance - but always in such a way that it strengthens the film. It's enough to make one believe the film's theory - that the Devil may like getting in the storyteller's way, but he doesn't really want to destroy him, because what would the Devil do with himself then? And I love that it's a film about the importance of stories but, instead of getting hung up on that theory and making big speeches about it, it gets carried away with its own ever-expanding story - thus proving the theory precisely by forgetting about it.
Plus, it has Tom Waits piloting an exploding mechababoushka, among its many other flights of fancy. And such flights of fancy they are! I can't remember the last film I saw which was so visually rich, whether in its worlds of the imagination, or in its London. And it does have to take place in London, doesn't it? The grandest, most fabled city in the world - but also one with grabbing thugs spilling out of crappy pubs, and Homebases insisting you spend spend spend, and its perpetual building sites.
Ashes to Ashes fans should be aware that Shaz gets a small role, but the real revelation is Lily Cole. I knew she was pretty, but I'd never seen her move, or speak, and so I'd never realised she was beautiful, let alone that she could act. Which given that face, and that she's just gone up to Cambridge, seems terribly unfair, but then like the film is so intent on reminding us, the world is full of wonders.

I also saw Crank this week. There's not so much to say about that one; like Shoot 'Em Up it's the action movie distilled to its purest form and injected into your eyeball with a syringe made of guns - smarter than it lets on, while also being the best sort of big dumb fun. During its ITV transmission, there was also an ad for the ITV4 debut of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse - two hours earlier. Well done, ITV. Said trailer didn't do anything useful like inform me of a repeat, but I tracked one down and...well, when I first heard about Dollhouse I thought, hang on, isn't that basically Joe 90 - The Sexy Years? The first episode didn't convince me otherwise but, because it's Whedon, I'm persevering. Even though I realised a while back that if Buffy started now, I don't think I'd make it through the first season.

In which I vanquish the undead but am nonetheless a bit grumpy on account of an early start

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:38:26 GMT

Further to the Making Of post, here's me killing zombies in the video for Brontosaurus Chorus' 'Louisiana'. And following up on my Spotify question, which got a lot of very helpful answers from musicians I know, it turns out that even someone at the level of fame of Robert Fripp is not making an acceptable amount of money from the service.

Watching David Attenborough's Life (though I'm an episode behind ~~so no spoilers~~), one of the main things which strikes me is how stupid creationists are. I'm not just talking about the way in which these animals are themselves evidence for nature as an evolving, changing thing (especially now we can see them learning new techniques, the monkeys in particular so human when they dry seeds before breaking them between stone hammer and anvil). I mean the way that the Argument from Design crumbles because, while there are all sorts of creator you could potentially infer from the nature on this planet, the god of the christians is not among them. That wacky Old Testament guy, maybe, just - he liked his carnage, after all. But no god of love could be responsible for the komodo dragons trailing their poisoned buffalo victim, prodding him with their tongues to see if he's weak enough to eat yet. Or how about the flies which inflate their own heads, and then their eyestalks, for mating display? Some kind of insectoid Tom of Finland might have made them, but that's not who the creationists preach. Hell, their chap seems to like monogamy, so one has to question what he was doing when he made hippos, where one big hippo gets the best bit of the river and all the females, and the other male hippos get sod all. I guess a mormon or muslim creationist might be able to use that, but a mainstream christian? Not so much.

alasdair drew my attention to something really fvcked up - and we're talking more fvcked up than a pocket black hole here - "My original art has been copied by a manufacturer who is now suing me in federal court to overturn my existing copyrights and continue making knockoffs. I have a strong case, a great lawyer and believe that if I can continue to defend myself, the case will be resolved in my favor. If I run out of funds before we reach trial, a default judgment would be issued against me and could put me out of business." In other words, who dares [sue first], wins, so long as they've got deep enough pockets. Not that I'm in a position to help this guy out but I really hope this spreads wide enough that he gets the support he needs and the thieving, devious wretches who are trying to pull one over on him get taken to the cleaners.

You wanna hold hands in the cemetery

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:11:25 GMT

On Wednesday I went to Catch, which has changed a lot in the past few years, to see a show headlined by Tim Ten Yen, who hasn't. The bill also featured a band called Hot Beds, who had a song about how Christmas now starts in October which worked both as a critique of festival creep and a big overwrought festive ballad which they can get away with playing outside December because it's about precisely that. Good work. I was, however, primarily there for the 18 Carat Love Affair who, as well as the usual delights, deployed a top hat and ace new track 'Dominoes'.
Catch might not be quite as typically, terribly East London as it used to be, but Friday found me in an even more atypical East London venue, in that it was seven storeys up (I think that's even higher than Collide-A-Scope) and done up like some kind of voodoo surf kitchen. Even before I started drinking, I saw a pink elephant trot past; fortunately, investigation confirmed that others could see it too and it was in fact a small child wearing a pink elephant head. Probably. It says a lot about The Deptford Beach Babes that they find places like this to play. That's a compliment, by the way.

As Peep Show bows out (and was this series the best extended advertisement for contraception ever aired?*), the comedy baton is handed over and The Thick of It returns. The new choice of minister interests me; Chris Langham having been, shall we say, rather too open-minded about acceptable sexual behaviour, they've this time opted for Rebecca Front, who if anything has the opposite problem; we should probably expect a Jan Moir cameo before season's end.

"Parents who think the new film of Maurice Sendak's picture book Where the Wild Things Are is too frightening for children can "go to hell", the author has said." It's a long time since I read the book, I'm not sure if I'm even that bothered about the film, but this piece gives me massive respect for the man.

Like most people, my first Nabokov was Lolita; for my second I took a recommendation and tried Despair, which almost finished him for me, but last week I finally had a third try and plumped for Pale Fire and, well, he's not a one-hit wonder. I think Despair's problem may have been translation, the difficulties of which are alluded to more than once in Pale Fire; I suspect that for the foreseeable I shall be sticking to Nabokov's English works.
This isn't quite the damned, despairing yet oh so beautiful hymn of Lolita, though; it's a game, a story told through deluded, shoddy notes to a mediocre poem**, one character commentating on another character's work, yet isn't there always that problem with unreliable narrators that they must be reliably unreliable, must let the truth shine through in a way few real delusionists ever manage?*** And for all Nabokov's undoubted craft, there are times when one is sure that we're reading Nabokov's thoughts, not those of the pathetic pantaloon Charles Kinbote (and did Nabokov ever write a protagonist who was not a deluded deviant?) or homely, drunk John Shade. Consider:
"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by this very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats."
When Kinbote tells us "I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel", we see Nabokov laughing over his shoulder. When he rhapsodises about language like that, however, we hear Nabokov speaking through him.
But then, I suppose it was only meant to be a game, and in a game fun counts for more than rigour. And it is a tremendously fun book, in a roundabout, mean-spirited sort of way.
Also, the last king of Kinbote's distant homeland, Zembla, is called Charles Xavier. The book came out one year before the debut of the X-Men, but somehow I can't picture Stan or Jack coping with Nabokov's prose.

*Though I have just found the perfect childcare solution.
**Well, the third canto has some moments of beauty, but otherwise we're in the authentically bathetic territory of the sort of sub-Frost American poet who gets good reviews of their collected works in the Guardian, but in which reviews the quoted excerpts convince you never, ever to read any of the work in question.
***OK, there's Angie Bowie's autobiography, but even that involved a ghostwriter whom I suspect of setting her up for a fall. Certainly, spending that much time in her company would make me want to do the same.

To set nine ice-cold children free in the ashes of the universe

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:05:33 GMT

A sign on the main gates announces that Finsbury Park itself will be closing at 5pm by the end of October, with even that shrinking down to 4.30 for the whole of December and the beginning of January. Now, aside from remembering that a couple of years ago it was never closed even in the middle of the night, I'm sure those times are ludicrously and unprecedentedly early, but I suspect that the joggers among you would be better placed to confirm that.

I've been having my old, epic dreams again lately, grand disjointed things that survive the interruptions even when they get crazed or loud enough to wake me. Which means that when they give the impression of continuing from night to night, I can never be quite sure whether they're telling the truth or just building on all those tricks about giving the appearance of a continuity which one picks up consciously and subconsciously from reading a lot of Grant Morrison. Lately there's been a lot of imagery which would suit a Saturday night TV take on Lovecraft - organic matter unfettered by contact with some nameless Unknown, extruding tendrils, faces coming loose - and it may or may not have been linked to the scene which mashed Seizure up with Gormley's Fourth Plinth to give us a slowly filling tank full of copper sulphate solution up there, the last Plinther drowning beatifically in the poison.

Not being an expert like cappuccino_kid, I've only seen three Joseph Losey films, enough/few enough that having taped The Damned I was surprised to find it a Hammer shocker with a young Oliver Reed in the main supporting role. There's a stilted Englishness I recognise in there, a menace, and a sense of perversion barely suppressed, but at times early in the film the stiltedness would just seem like bad acting if you weren't looking for it, if you didn't see that this came from the same year as his classic, The Servant. Without wanting to spoiler the film (old, but fairly obscure - the spoilering protocols there are always unclear, aren't they?) the Hammer elements seem strangely well-fitted to Losey's England.

Alan Moore is doing the libretto for the next Gorillaz opera.

A raisin loaf with Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' swirled in

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:07:01 GMT

I thought my policy of always giving a new HBO show a chance might have hit its limits with Hung. Especially since it's on More4 on Thursday nights, at an end of the week already overloaded with Sarah Jane Adventures, Wednesday night's HBO double-bill, Friday's comedy options...but much to my surprise, the first episode at least was excellent. The trailers have been going about it all wrong, emphasising the comedy/prurient angle we've all seen before. Whereas the show itself...in much the same way as The Wire used police and drug gangs as a way to examine the decline of the American city, or Deadwood looked at the birth of the nation by way of a psychopathic publican, Hung examines the squeezing of the middle class through the example of a hard-up history teacher with a really big cock. It's more about the way everything seems to be falling apart, and the sense that our working life is not working out like we were given to expect, than Thomas Jane's endowment.

Wednesday night: augstone brings billetdoux along on a mini-US deputation to the Noble, establishing that even if Obama has more sense than to be seen with Gordon Brown, the special relationship is alive and well at the level of indie pubbing. Thursday: a Brontosaurus Chorus show, the first I've seen since icecoldinalex joined and the first time I've really heard the song for which I spent two days filming - Johnny and I have to resist the urge to re-enact the video on stage. The gig's in a weird little basement venue on Denmark Street called Peter Parker's; there's no Spider-Man iconography that I can see, but the cocktail 'Peter Parker's Cvm Shot' still makes me think 'thwip!'. The support are a noise duo whose name is never announced (my own guess: Sine Cosine Tangent); they're playing in front of a projection of Akira, the subtitles on which provide a perfect excuse to stare at the girl's fairly impressive cleavage. All told, I probably had enough material for a post on Friday, but I had to dash off to catch Seizure (ignore all the pretentious guff in the leaflet, the key details of this art project are that it is very blue and very shiny and quite magical). However, this is probably for the best as it means I can gently draw a veil over the weekend.

I keep hearing good things about the comics of Matt Fraction, so I keep picking them up when the library has them, and I'm still not convinced that he's anything but Warren Ellis's even more try-hard younger brother. All his characters sound the same: "Let's make out and whip up more plans for mass slaughter", cackles the villain. Whereas Iron Man himself gloats "Your tax dollars pay me to beat the Hell out of people like this. (I decline the paycheck, by the way)". Which is identical in tone, and also completely meaningless - he just came up with a line he liked and deployed it even though it required a caveat that then made no sense. The only way I could persevere was by pairing it with the disappointing Micro Men on BBC4, there being a strange congruence of themes. "My biggest nightmare has come true...Iron Man 2.0 is here...and I'm not the one that made it" - the cheap, easy to use and ultimately disposable new technology as plot driver, all made me start identifying Clive Sinclair as a British comedy version of Tony Stark. I don't know what that says about anything but it says more than Fraction's Iron Man.
(Also read something where he at least tried to ditch the tech fetish and the KEWL! - Secret Invasion: Thor. And that was just horribly characterless, in spite of featuring Beta Ray Bill, so maybe the usual mode is the lesser evil for him. The failure of this one was thrown into particular relief by how funny and characterful and cosmic and generally *fun* Secret Invasion: Hercules could make a story starting from a fairly similar premise)

*Although having made derogatory mention of Ellis, it's only fair I acknowledge that the final issue of Planetary was beautiful - the first comic since the end of Captain Britain to leave me both crying and laughing in public. Even if that doesn't explain why it was so ridiculously late. Or why newuniversal is. Or Doktor Sleepless.

Distracted from title composition by melancholy Italo synth

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:04:31 GMT

Is anybody aware of any musicians making public complaint or comment about Spotify? They're all happy to sound off for or against filesharing, after all, and any of the complaints about filesharing (except, obviously, 'I'm not getting paid') surely apply to Spotify too. Plus, the obvious extra one of the ads - yesterday I realised that I should probably have heard Public Image Limited's Metal Box and used Spotify to rectify the situation, but the main result was that I have the Ladyhawke song from that beer ad stuck in my head. Now, OK, complaining about Spotify which *is* paying would be biting the hand that feeds...but since when were pop stars averse to doing that? Patrick Wolf slags off MP3s while expecting fans to invest in his new album in exchange for an MP3 copy of it. And admittedly he's a bit of a berk these days, but he's hardly alone in that. I might just have missed the relevant quotes, though it seems like something CMU would cover - if so, please enlighten me. Vague recollections are as welcome as links.

Saw a fashionable young persons' band play their first show outside North America last night, but in spite of the self-parodically indie name (or is it knowingly self-parodically indie? Who can keep track anymore) I rather enjoyed Natalie Portman's Shaved Head. Bouncy electro-indie, fun rather than trying to be cool, and an audience to match. And the great thing about the Flowerpot is that if you're not a fashionable young person who wants to be grooving down the front, you can still find a seat with a decent view. Back of the net.

The main reason I took any notice of Kim Stanley Robinson asking why no science fiction has won the Booker was the letter he quotes from Virginia Woolf to Olaf Stapledon, in which she quite correctly admits "you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you - as one does those who reach what one has aimed at". Robinson himself has never been much to my taste, and none of the SF novels he advocates as worthy Booker winners are ones I've read, though I could certainly name a few other candidates. Beyond that, he wasn't saying anything new, and seemed to have missed the point that whatever its original intent, the Booker is a prize for middlebrow book-group literary fiction, which is a genre like any other - even to the extent of very occasionally throwing up a good book (The Line of Beauty may be Alan Hollinghurst's weakest but it's still well worth a read, sub-Brideshead TV adaptation notwithstanding). Even when Booker judge John Mullan's rebuttal presented himself as a convenient example of a species of straw man we might have hoped extinct, bullish about his ignorance rather than simply complacent (he 'said that he "was not aware of science fiction," arguing that science fiction has become a "self-enclosed world...it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other." Must have missed the bit where it's all over the cinema and TV screens, but then he probably still believes neither of those is a proper artform either, the dessicated fool)...well, his loss. But the point where I finally got annoyed was when another judge, Lucasta Miller, said in the October 10th 'Week in Books' feature puzzlingly absent from the archive that "When I reread the six, the one I felt had the highest chance of still being read in 100 years time was Summertime by Coetzee...In the event, the majority vote did not go to the book most likely to be read in the far future".
It says so much that a Booker judge, even one less wilfully stupid than Mullan, could consider a hundred years hence "the far future". Even if we assume - as literary fiction by default assumes - that things carry on much as before, that the coming century brings no ascent into posthumanity, then there are children alive today who will be around then. Only if we take the line - but this is again the province of science fiction - that catastrophe is coming, can we expect everyone now living to be dead then.
This is the smallness of scale, the littleness of thought, which defines modern literary fiction. People who would kill their own children to be Woolf but don't even see that Woolf knew she was no Stapledon. I've long said that in the 21st century, you can only write historical fiction or science fiction, because by the time your book hits the presses, 'now' is over. Things change too fast. The Booker shortlist, if nothing else, has confirmed my point for me.
(Yes, I know that's a slight oversimplification - you can write historical science fiction, such as Arthur C Clarke's wonderful The Fountains of Paradise, which I'm reading at the moment. Slipping between a thinly-veiled Sri Lanka two millennia past and a hundred years hence, evocative and visionary, it's exactly the sort of thing the Booker would have loved if it had only limited its scope and intelligence a little)

Bathe in the soothing wisdom of the capybara

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:03:28 GMT

The main reason I don't walk all the way into town more often is that I've never found a route I liked - until now. Setting off early for hoshuteki's birthday, I started off through the Gillespie Park walk by the railway*, where I was able to verify that I am in fact faster than a speeding locomotive if by 'speeding' we mean 'being held between Finsbury Park and Drayton Park to regulate the service". Then through somnolent Drayton Park to Highbury, right off Liverpool Road and slide through the leafy squares of Barnsbury; this has all felt like Arthur Machen territory but once you skip over the brief busy patch of King's Cross you hit the motherlode, the little streets off the Gray's Inn Road. And there you are, in Bloomsbury, which I realise I now think of as the heart of town.

publicansdecoy and obsessive_katy got married this weekend, which is lovely and all, ditto setting aside a dedicated 'raucous drunks' table at the dinner (yes, obviously I was on it), but the masterstroke was having the wedding in a zoo! With a snow leopard and pygmy hippos and "one of the world's most mysterious mammals, the Fosca"**. Also a toastmaster, which I am now contemplating as a future career since it appears to consist of getting drunk in a tailcoat at strangers' weddings and perving on the bride. And the Black Plastic DJs. More weddings like this, please. The day was only slightly marred by the journey home, on which I had a full and frank exchange of views with a fellow who felt that throwing a pastie in my face was fair comment given I have a big nose.

Sunday, alas, began for me with the news of two Doctor Who deaths - seventies producer Barry Letts and 'Horror of Glam Rock' guest star Stephen Gately. Very sad. Mostly spent the rest of the day reading, though I did take a brief walk around the park at dusk and found myself terrified by the skies, in which the advancing mountain ranges of cloud seemed to presage apocalypse rather than the lovely clear day we've got today. I did attempt to watch Ghost Rider (or as they call it in the Philippines, Spirited Racer) and...well, it does a lot of things right. Given how Peter Fonda comes across these days, and Easy Rider, casting him as the Devil in a film about motorbikes is brilliant. And the narrator from Big Lebowski as the gravedigger who explains the plot and is blatantly a previous rider, great decision. But...in the lead, Nicolas Cage. Who as has been the case for a decade plus now, is just annoying, and can't convey any emotion bar 'faintly amusing hangdog puzzlement'. And even when, after 50 minutes, he eventually turns into the Ghost Rider, you realise that while modern special effects can do a lot of things, having as the lead character a guy with a flaming skull for a head is still slightly beyond them. On the printed page it looks great, the image makes instant sense. On screen...nothing quite looks right about it.
So I turned over to watch the Pixar documentary instead. And bless them, what lovely guys they all seem to be. Tying back to Ghost Rider, it also makes me feel I was right not to worry about the Disney takeover of Marvel, because while it is very clear from what the Pixar people say that Disney did lose its way for a while and insist on churning out bland crap, it also seems clear that, with John Lasseter now in overall charge of the creative side at Disney as well as Pixar, and having kicked out all the execs who weren't creatives, Marvel will be in good hands.
And though I still have no great desire to see Up (possibly because it's directed by the same guy as Monsters Inc, my least favourite of the Pixars I've seen), I do now really want to see Wall-E. Could anyone possibly lend me the DVD?

Neil Gaiman posted a link to a story about small-town homophobes wanting to remove gay-themed books from the local library, which would be just a normal, dismal story of people who urgently need killing (the Christian Civil Liberties Union has to be the most nonsensically-named organisation since Campaign Against P0rn0graphy And Censorship) if it weren't for the name of the town: West Bend. Everyone reading those books is already a West Bender, so what's the problem?

*This option is unavailable on match days, though - that path is closed, just another of the thousand disruptions to everyone else's life which must be made for the sake of the thrice-damned footballists.
**And porcupines! And rhinos, which terrify me. And tamarins!