Alan Moore is launching a magazine, of all things. That Melinda Gebbie and Kevin O'Neill are contributing is no surprise, but he also has Graham Linehan, Steve Aylett and Josie Long involved.

The trailer for the remake of The Prisoner doesn't do much to change my original opinion that it's a fundamentally bad idea, even with Ian McKellen. It doesn't help that the trailer is nearly ten minutes long; trailers should not be so long that you get bored before you've even seen the show.

Though I did also find time for Popular, drunken singalongs to the best album ever and setting myself on fire, this weekend was largely occupied with the Brontosaurus Chorus video shoot. If you've ever felt that between the 28 Weeks Later scene outside the Noble, and Shaun of the Dead in Crouch End, there was too big a zombie gap, then your worries are over - shambling undeath is now available atop Crouch Hill too. The first day of Parkland Walk filming was interrupted by joggers (including Bernard Butler), dogwalkers and children who will probably be scarred for life; yesterday we were next to a soft p0rn shoot.

I've cut down on how many comics I get lately - the obvious financial reasons don't intersect well with rising comics prices, and even beyond that there's a bit of a lull underway in the artform/industry anyway these past few months. But yesterday I picked up four weeks' worth, as well as having this week dropped in on a couple of libraries I've not visited in ages and found a stack of collections*. Not all superheroes, there are some crime ones and a goth sitcom thing, but mostly. And I've realised something - third-rate superhero comics are my celebrity mags. I can read a collection in twenty minutes or so, and if it doesn't improve my life in any meaningful way, I find it soothing nonetheless. And if it doesn't stand up by itself, it feeds into that vast tapestry that is a shared universe, just like the exclusive nightclubs of London and LA form a shared universe for a Heat reader; this would explain also why I can't continue reading a book or watching a TV show which I don't think is very good, but can carry on with a comic, so long as no expenditure is involved beyond time ie it's from the library. And fundamentally, you can't tell me Green Lantern is any more unreal than Lady Gaga.
Clearly I'm not talking about something like All-Star Superman, say, which is at once a truly first-class work of fiction and a holy book far preferable to any of the currently popular choices. A Watchmen or Enigma stands deservedly amongst the great literature of the past few decades, and even at the level below them you have stuff coming out at the moment like The Boys, Ultimate Spider-Man or Batman and Robin which, if not quite great art, are nonetheless so well-crafted as to justify themselves without embarrassment and outclass anything on this (or most) year's Booker shortlist.
Conversely, I'm not talking about the worst of the worst. Some of those I'll read when I get home from the pub, for the car-crash fascination of it. A little above them are the only things I won't touch at all, the ones which aren't atrocious beyond all reckoning but simply dull and miserable and confused - ie, the majority of DC's recent output. But between that and the good stuff there's a vast range of workmanlike, competent material - words I would use as an insult if applied to any other medium, pop especially, but which in comics, I find scratches an itch.
In summary: just because Facebook tells you I've read a comic, don't necessarily take that as a recommendation. I'm an addict.

*Plus a few actual books, I should add (Wodehouse, Arthur C Clarke, Anais Nin), but broadly speaking I still own literally hundreds of books I've not read, and almost no comics I haven't.

The bit of Friday's post which seemed most to interest my public was the bit about buses I chucked in just before posting. So: buses. On Sunday all useful lines out of the area were out, because two had engineering works and some arse had thrown himself under other. Which meant I had to travel for longer than I usually would on a bus fuller than it would usually be. Last window seats available are near the back of the top deck, so I plonk myself down there and hope that the back seat won't then be occupied by some dismal little street gang yawping in second-hand slang. My prayers are answered; instead I get a gaggle of postgrads having an only occasionally infuriating chat about the nature of power. The one arguing that it's always essentially subjective had a surprisingly compelling case.
Clearly my seat of choice on a bus is top deck, front window. Obviously you get the view, but also if you do read, nobody can see that the final issue of Captain Britain & MI:13 has you in tears.
(Also out: the new Phonogram, whose success with the formal experiment of a fixed camera angle is all the more impressive given I just read a much-recommended Luna Brothers comic, The Sword, in which the first issue was cheating horribly with its artist's eye 'camera')

Spent much of the weekend sneezy and ill, so as far as I'm concerned I've now survived swine flu. But not too ill to make despina's lovely wedding, at which one particularly heartwarming sight: a dancefloor on which three generations are happily dancing together to the Prodigy's 'Voodoo People'. The tiny people were generally better behaved that one sees at weddings, in part because they'd been given something to do, wonderful things called Art Jars scattered around the place with toys and craft stuff for them. And for drunk adults, of course: the next day, in addition to their normal contents, my pockets contained:
One small rubber duck
One fortune, hopefully true
One boggly eye
One crayon drawing of a giraffe
One translucent blue pebble

The first man charged under those dubious new 'extreme p0rn' laws is Alan Moore. But thankfully, it's not because the authorities or their masters in the tabloids finally read Lost Girls, just someone else of the same name. In this case at least, the new charge does appear to be there as a safety net, in case he escapes the charge of misbehaviour with a 15-year old - but it's still dangerous to have on the books any legislation which depends so heavily on the good sense of those enforcing it, because you never know when you might get a Mail-reader running a police force.

I've finished Something Fresh, PG Wodehouse's first Blandings story - and yet I don't really feel I got my Blandings fix. Jeeves & Wooster sprang into life fully formed, ditto Psmith; but when first we see Blandings, there's no sign of Gally Threepwood, possibly my favourite Wodehouse character. Worse, there's not one mention of pigs! And while Lord Emsworth's absent-mindedness is the plot's motor, he's not quite the dreamy soul we know from later books; he even gets involved in a spot of gunplay! Dash it all, it's not even high summer, but instead a rather cold spell in spring. It's still Wodehouse, and the man was pretty much incapable of writing a dud, so I shouldn't want to give the impression of complaining; it just comes as a surprise that his world didn't always come to him complete.

So we're sending two Nazis to Europe. On the plus side, at least the christians don't have any seats - though aren't there some still to declare? That would put the sour cherry on the carrot cake and no mistake. And I see this news just after reading the Captain Britain and MI13 annual. This being the best new superhero comic in years, one which took a character even Alan Moore couldn't make sing, and made him into the national icon he always should have been, our own Captain America as opposed to a cheap knock-off. The series hit around the same time as Garth Ennis' Dan Dare reboot, and they shared an attempt to build a sense of a British patriotism which was strong and unashamed, but which gave no quarter to the racist scum who profane the flag and the history they so tattily invoke. And the annual? Well, that's the first issue to come out since the news that Captain Britain and MI13 is cancelled. There's just not enough of a market for it. And as above, so below. It's not that I feel any shame over how this will make us look in Europe's eyes, you understand - enough other countries are sending their own fascists, and as per last century, I'm confident that ours are hardly the biggest threat of the bunch. Besides which, the European Parliament is a bad joke in the first place. I'm more embarrassed over how this makes us look to ourselves, how much it exacerbates the national mood of bemused decline. Hopefully, it'll at least be enough of a wake-up call to improve matters, but it could as easily be another step down that sorry road. In the meantime, yesterday's jokes about "ask David to bring The Final Solution" (which worked better verbally, italics and capitals being silent) and the unicorn lynching seem slightly less amusing.

Othergates:
I don't normally mind waits at the doctor's; in accord with Sarll's First Rule, I always have plenty to read about my person. Except my surgery has now installed a TV broadcasting inane health programming, noisily. Desist!
Unusually old-school Stay Beautiful this weekend, both in terms of those attending, and in not having a live act. "This is how we used to do it in the olden days!", I tell bemused youngsters for whom the night has only ever been at the Purple Turtle. The playlist is less old-school, which is a shame as such a direction might have saved me from accidentally dancing to La Roux.
Two Grant Morrison comics out last week, and while Batman & Robin was a great, straightforward superhero story with art by the ever-impressive Frank Quitely, it wasn't a patch on the glorious, tragic, yearning final issue of Seaguy's second act. Guess which one sells about ten times as much as the other?

All those Sam Tyler references in Ashes to Ashes had me thinking, whoever's mysteriously contacting Alex...could that voice be John Simm doing posh? It could, couldn't it? And then the trailer for next week blew my theory apart. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted, and now I'm back to having no idea at all where they're going with this, but being confident that it will be somewhere good. And I've been reading a 2000 issue of Select which I found while clearing out my desk, all articles about 'what are MP3s?' and *video* reviews and interviews saying how Embrace's second album will take them to the next level, and this isn't even from so very long ago - I moved to London in 2000 - and it makes me more than ever think that after Ashes to Ashes is done, the nineties are now strange and distant enough for Dead Man Walking to be a perfectly viable series.

Speaking of changing eras, I read Virginia Woolf's Orlando yesterday, and what a glorious confection of rhapsody, absurdity and time it is. Yes, it's 13 years since I got into the band of the same name and followed up plenty of the other reference points, but I'd seen the film and I don't like reading books too soon after seeing the film, even in cases like this where knowing the plot is a fairly abstract concern. It's the starring role The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has now found for Orlando (the androgyne, not the band, though that I would also love to see) which had me investigating, because the infuriating braggart of '1910' is not at all how I remembered Tilda Swinton in the film. And indeed, is not what I find in Woolf's original. I think Moore and O'Neill have the promiscuity and the rough-housing down better than Swinton, but she has that distracted quality which they've lost. And while inserting side adventures during and after the novel's timeline works perfectly, I question whether LoEG has not done a certain damage to the premise by making Orlando an ancient who fought at Troy and Actium; one of the features which I feel most strongly in Woolf's novel is the sense of Orlando's rootedness in the English countryside, the ancestry which ties Orlando to the soil regardless of gender or distance. And it's a shame, because the way in which Woolf's Orlando moves so self-consciously yet seamlessly from age to age - a gigantic cloud rolling in as the 18th Century gives way to the 19th, for instance, and England suddenly, gradually growing damper - is just the sort of play on the eras' conceptions of themselves and each others to which the League project draws such delightful attention*.

In much the same spirit of meditative Englishess as Orlando, I finally watched Cloudspotting, which I apologise for not plugging while it could still be caught on iPlayer. I've raved about Gavin Pretor-Pinney's Cloudspotter's Guide here before, I'm sure, and the new appreciation it gave me for the beauty which floats above us most every day. But the concept works even better on TV, with the BBC's archive of near Miyazaki-quality flying footage to plunder, and Pretor-Pinney himself so naturally and thoroughly engaging, like a cross between Jim Broadbent and Mark Gatiss, except more fun. One credit did surprise me, though: Script editor: Steve Aylett.

Never got around to writing about that Keith TOTP/Glam Chops show last week, did I? In part because I only wrote about them a week or so earlier, and not much changed except that Eddie was drunker and Glam Chops have a new song called 'Thunderstruck'. Which kicks arse. Oh, and I finally watched a Gregg Araki film, Mysterious Skin. Which was much as I expected in terms of tormented small-town US gayness, but all that UFO stuff and missing memories made me think of Velvet Goldmine and Flex Mentallo, which can never be a bad thing. Also, it has Dawn from Buffy as an off-the-rails fag hag with great eye make-up! It is, alas, let down by the standard problem afflicting any film which addresses wrongcockery - even in a world where cinema can convincingly show us an army of thousands of orcs and undead rucking in front of Minas Tirith, if you're showing a kiddy-fiddler on film, the effects and editing have to be so clunky as to make entirely clear even to madmen and magistrates that the child was not on stage while the nasty man said the rude things.

*Of course, nerd polyfilla is easily applied here: in the League world Woolf's book is known by the title which is in any case its full title here: Orlando - A Biography. Woolf was one of those eminently readable but maddeningly agenda-led biographers, who in satirising the conventions of biography, ran roughshod over a real life rather than a fictional one.

I'm not especially into signings. I'll go along if it's a mate who might not be drawing a massive crowd, to show support, but queueing for hours just to be in the Presence...why? But, Gosh's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen signing was going to have copies of Century: 1910 weeks early, and that's another matter. Except, you could buy them in the shop, and the signing was around the corner. Well, since I was there, and my immediate agenda was to read '1910', and then read the Guide and the main bit of the paper, and since I was there, and since I could do all that reading while queueing...might as well hang around.
Two hours later, they're all read. I could make a start on the review section, but I wouldn't be doing that anyway. The question 'Why am I here?' no longer has a solid answer. I depart, and by the bus stop find that the Hawksmoor church has a deeply surreal exhibition in its basement, which I wander in perfect solitude. Alan Moore's From Hell turned me on to Hawksmoor; I feel more sense of communion with him down in that crypt than I would awkwardly saying 'Hiya!' in a crowded signing room. And then as I board the bus, a perfectly-timed text tells me there's a picnic in the park. If nothing else, the queueing means that relatively speaking, I'm one of the sober ones.
As for the new volume...well, I know there's been talk of each third of Century being a satisfying read in itself, so that the inevitable delays aren't a problem. But this is very much an opening chapter, and it's one whose animating spirit is Brecht, meaning that like him, at times it's rather heavy-handed for my tastes. But it's still Alan Moore, and it's still the League, so the intricacy of the patchwork is still staggering, the story still has more heart than it's sometimes given credit for, and the Iain Sinclair riff is absolutely hilarious - if you've read him, anyway. Whenever they turn up, I'm very much looking forward to the rest of Century, not least because the promised crossovers include Vincent Chase and David Simon's Baltimore. Speaking of Baltimore, there was a drunk perv getting thrown out of Power's on Friday who looked like an uglier Frank Sobotka, but who insisted he was a police officer. It wasn't until his attempts to taunt the bouncer expanded to include moonwalking that I realised, this must be what Michael Jackson looks like nowadays, whiter than ever (or indeed, red); minus the hat, mask and shades; and after the doctors' instructions to bulk up ahead of his London shows. I was there to see Borderville, whose singer weirdly turns out to have done the same course as me at the same college, while really reminding me of Jesse from Flipron. Extremely good band, but while they're great showmen, part of me wonders whether some of the subtlety and structure of the songs doesn't get lost live. They're also, I think, the sort of band who would benefit from a smart producer, as opposed to the sort who just spaff a load of money on one so's to have something to talk about in interviews. Other acts are Rubella (very pretty, shame about the lack of songs), and Alvarez King(?), who at least realise that they are 'freshwater fish in salt water'.

For the first time in, I think, three years, I'm DJing in London tomorrow night, at Don't Stop Moving. Which does have a Myspace and website too but they've not been updated in years, so for Facebook refuseniks, the basics are thus:
It's angelv's pop night. This means I will not be playing, well, today's Current Music for starters. Or any from recent posts. I will almost certainly play Girls Aloud, and Pulp, and beyond that I have various scrawled ideas with question marks next to most of them so your guess is as good as mine. Well, it probably isn't unless you know me very well, but still.
The night runs from 8-1 at not the real Camden Head but the former Liberties, on Camden High Street. It costs not very much to get in, two quid possibly? It is dead good. I am on early if you particularly wish to catch/avoid my set. It will be fun!

In other news: Alan Moore is apparently taking inspiration from "the excellent Charlie Brooker" in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century. Just when you think he couldn't be any cooler...

Black Plastic on Saturday was a classic example of how London's greedy venues threaten to cripple their own trade with the short-termist desire for a buck; the Star had also booked in two or three birthday parties, taking up lots of space (including, for the first few hours, what should have been the dancefloor) with people who had no particular interest in the music or the night. Or indeed, much interest in music in general; they were in a trendy East London venue, so whatever they were hearing, must be cool. Not cool enough to make them dance or anything, but cool enough that whatever had been played, wouldn't have been able to scare them off. Even once the tables finally moved, there were too many of them standing around talking, making the place feel like a bar, and have I ever mentioned how much I hate bars? I salute the courage and indefatigibility of the DJs for making sure that there were still classic moments in amongst all this, but why does doing a night in this city have to be such an uphill struggle?

The temperature seemed to be trying to cycle through three seasons in a day, but I finally made it down to Shooter's* Hill on Friday. I'm not sure quite why this had become such a goal of mine, even with the Luxembourg lyric bolstering the Alan Moore story; perhaps it's just like when you're looking for a particular pen absent-mindedly, and it imperceptibly mounts to become an obsessive hunt, because I can't claim any particular epiphany as the lodestone which was drawing me there. Although it is lovely...well, not so much the main road which takes you there, but you can start from Greenwich and wander through the bit of the park which always seems to get neglected in picnic season, with the flowers and the woodpeckers and deer. And then out across Blackheath, which is so open and happy in the sun, when the werewolves aren't out. And then the rather dusty, concrete, Ballardian stretch - but then you're between commons and woods and the sudden apparition of a tower which claims the awesome name of Severndroog Castle, and these are proper broad-leafed, light, English woods, where bluetits titter and kids are still making rope swings rather than doing anything edgy or urban or Mail-baiting. And if you carry on over the hill, and come out of the wood, you'll realise there's no postcode on the street sign, and you've accidentally walked out of London, and you need a drink and a sit down.

When Grant Morrison released Seaguy back in 2004, it wasn't very well received. The story of a superhero born too late, living in a world where everything is perfect (isn't it?) and there's no evil left to fight (is there?) just didn't seem to strike a chord in the boom years. Now we've realised that the whole age of ever-rising prosperity and ever-bigger plasma screens was a mirage, it looks so astonishingly prescient that one wonders at people ever missing the point. Perfect timing, then, for the sequel over which Morrison essentially held DC to ransom for his big event work, Slaves of Mickey Eye. Except now his point (those cuddly institutions who told you everything was OK? Do you really trust them?) seems almost too obvious. Prophecy's a tough game. Fortunately, there's quite enough Mad Brilliant Ideas TM, moments of genuine pathos and mysteries as yet unsolved to keep one interested beyond the obvious message. If you prefer the Invisibles and Filth Morrison to the superheroics (not that I've ever felt the distinction was particularly noticeable), then this one is for you.

*The apostrophe seems to come and go, but I prefer it with one.

I find myself worrying that Charlie Brooker might be the new Bill Hicks - ie, awesome, and usually right, but too easily quoted in too many situations in a way which makes the over-quoter seem a bit of a prick. And I'm as guilty of this as anyone, and I think maybe I need to scale it back a bit. Except why did this revelation hit me in the same week he returns to our TV screens? Ah, my timing.

Philipp Blom's The Vertigo Years aims to overturn the idea that the first 14 years of the twentieth century were a peaceful, if shadowed, idyll, the last days of the old world before the wars and revolutions made the modern world. Like most history with an agenda, the hand is overplayed, but if only as a counterbalance, it's a valuable take on how much was as new and strange and unsettling a hundred years ago as whatever's causing the latest panic now. More than the old 'how very similar then was to now' trick, though, it was little details which caught my attention. Wooden ships of the line, Trafalgar-style, when would you think the last of those was launched by the Royal Navy? 1879. The creator of Bambi also wrote p0rn (I'm surprised that didn't somehow make it into Lost Girls, though the Rite of Spring riot is here in detail). The borders between 'a very long time ago' and 'a long time ago', in other words, are as permeable as those between 'the old days' and 'I remember when'. Oh, and while I knew the Belgians had been utter gits in the Congo, I had no idea the death toll was ten million. Hitler gets all the press, but he doesn't even have the twentieth century's second highest total for genocide by a European ruler. Lightweight.

Obviously it's great news that Grant Morrison is back with Frank Quitely for (some of) the new Batman & Robin comic, and that he's getting to continue with Seaguy and do a Multiverse book and various other bits and pieces. But..."I’ve just been doing an Earth Four book, which is the Charlton characters but I’ve decided to write it like “Watchmen.” [laughs] So it’s written backwards and sideways and filled with all kinds of symbolism". It was obvious from the first time we glimpsed Earth Four in 52 that it was very much a Dark Charlton world, playing up the Watchmen correspondences; they even showed Peacemaker in a window as a nod to the exit of his analogue, the Comedian. I assumed that world would be used in passing for the sort of third-stringer-written continuity frottage that makes up so much of DC's output - it may have cropped up in Countdown for all I know, and that was very much the sort of place where I assumed it would stay. Morrison's use of a multiversal Captain Atom as a Dr Manhattan piss-take in Superman Beyond...well, it was one of the weakest things in there, but it was forgivable. A whole series, though? Morrison is the second best comics writer in the world. Moore has pretty much departed comics. Is it not about time that Morrison got over the anxiety of influence?
(In arguably related news, I swear our team could have done better at the pub quiz last night had it not been for the distractingly cute girl two tables over with a copy and a badge of Watchmen)

Last week I was asked to write something about my journey, and it turned out rather well, so in the parlance of Nu-Facebook, I thought I might 'share': ( Stroud Green )

Just once, could we maybe have a season of Skins without ( spoilers )?

So anyway, I finally cracked and went to see ( Watchmen )

Realised last night that I've not been further than walking distance in a week. Now, given I live in London's Fashionable North London and walk fast, that covers a lot of territory - for instance, Wednesday's New Royal Fam gig was well within it. And very good too, in spite of inexplicable attacks of self-doubt from certain parties. I even managed the 'Rules OK' dance routine, kind of. Local Girls sounded OK so far as I could tell but I had people to talk to down the back, and the inaugural Charley's Classic Covers set as opener kicked arse. After charleston did 'I'm Straight' I could only wonder if it would be followed by a song about being really tall, possibly 'Empire State Human'. Wrong song but right act - she finished with a storming 'Love Action' guest-sung by exliontamer who has a surprisingly majestic voice.
But yes, walking distance. I'm on Oyster PAYG at present so it's not like I'm wasting anything, but I still feel I should maybe have an explore further afield today.

edit: In fairness, I've just seen the expanded list of 'After Watchmen' recommendations and more of it is good than not.

The radio adaptation of Iain M Banks' 'The State of the Art' reminded me how much that bloody story depressed me. Reading the Culture books out of order, because it doesn't really matter, I'd concluded that getting a native writer to introduce the concept of the Culture to a civilisation ahead of formal contact was exactly the sort of thing that wise and wonderful society might attempt. Except then I got to this one, where they find "the place with the genocide", aka Earth, and ultimately decide against contact. And all this set in 1977. I could have lived my whole life in the Culture, you bastards. Anyway. Good adaptation by Paul Cornell, and with the Doctor-who-never-was, Paterson Joseph, as one of the leads. Opposite Nina Sosanya, though race is never specified as an issue; I wonder if that would be as doable on TV? I'd like to think so. All the Who alumni reminded me that before I'd ever read Banks, my first encounter with the Culture was through their Who book analogues, the People. Even then I recognised it as perhaps the first utopia I'd ever seen which really felt like somewhere I'd want to live. Well, that and Miracleman, but if the latter ever does get completed, I now know that Gaiman planned for The Golden Age (where I thought the story ended, with balloons) to be followed by Silver and Dark Ages.

Channel 4 inexplicably scheduled the two things I wanted to watch this week opposite each other - nice work there, chaps. Well, OK, there was that Heston Blumenthal show in which he made absinthe & d1ldo jelly, but for all that I love his mad science, at times I was reminded that I was watching a cookery show, got bored and had to read a book on folklore. Which reminded me about the concept of being 'elf-struck' just as the ads showed that one about stroke symptoms - followed by one for Fairy. Terrifying moment. So anyway, C4 putting perhaps the most heartwarming episode of Skins ever opposite the terrifying Red Riding, a missive from that nasty old England of Black Box Recorder's that I was talking about recently, Life on Mars without the laughs. I had been looking forward to this flush of David Peace adaptations, but while this one (of a book I've not read) convinced me, I no longer have any interest in The Damned United given the producer 'said the film-makers had taken a conscious decision to lighten the book's tone. "We didn't dwell on his alcoholism or his decline. That wasn't the story we wanted to tell. In quite tough times, we wanted to make a film with an upbeat ending - you come out of the cinema thinking it was an enjoyable experience and that Clough was a good guy."'

Drayton Park - a station I've been through plenty of times on the train, but in spite of how near I knew it must be to me, not somewhere I'd ever passed on foot. This week I finally found it, part of a whole area sharing the name, tucked away between Highbury and Holloway with the same sort of tesseract magic as London uses to hide Somers Town away where there really shouldn't be space for a district. I love this city and its labyrinths. Passing through there en route to Shoreditch where 18 Carat Love Affair were playing with fewer bands than expected at the Legion, a venue whose refits have actually worked out pretty well, unusually for the area. Broke off from talking to their singer about Alan Moore to go to the bar, where the barman who served me had SOLVE and COAGULA tattooed down his arms; if the 'elf-struck' coincidence was terrifying, this one reminded me of the happier side of living in a world where magic happens.

More Catholic hilarity as helping a nine year old, raped by her stepfather since age 6, to obtain an abortion is judged excommunicable! No word whether Pope Sidious has personally approved this decision, but I think we can assume so. He's probably offered the stepfather a job too, he seems to have the main skills required for the priesthood.
edit: This Vatican endorsement of the Brazilian church's position just in.

Finally saw the hilarious Superbad on Friday; I loved it, though being shown it by a female friend I could see that her amusement was purer, in that it wasn't tempered with that terrible recognition anyone who's ever been a teenage boy must feel. Mentioning it to augstone later, he thought I was asking if he'd seen Superman; I wasn't, but if his secret identity were McLovin instead of Clark Kent, wouldn't that be glorious? Also on Friday night: got lost in Emirates, impersonated a chessboard, saw Sex Tourists/Doe Face Lilian/The Firm. As is traditional on Holloway Road love-ins, the roster also included one band I didn't know; as is traditional, they were pants, ie so pants that even being pretty girls in knee-length socks covering 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' couldn't save them. Let's hope tradition stops before the Gaff burns down, though.
Saturday and Sunday also fun, but Monday...that Monday was overacting. It hammered its point home with a scenery-chewing excess of Mondayness. I did not approve.

Glen David Gold's Carter Beats The Devil was, quite deservedly if unusually, a success both with the general public and with people I know. His follow-up has been delayed and delayed, but should finally be with us this year. Except, just like various bands have had exclusive distribution deals with various chains (mainly in the States), in the UK Waterstone's get Sunnyside in July, and everyone else has to wait 'til Autumn. What makes this even stranger - that's the hardback, ie the prestige edition aimed at people who have money to spare and really can't wait for the book. Which comes out in the US in May, and can be pre-ordered from amazon.com for $17.79. That's not quite the bargain it would have been two years ago, but if you're into the book enough to get a hardback in July, for about the same price you can get one in May instead. So what do Waterstone's and the UK publishers get out of this, except for winding up other booksellers?

Comics links: have a bunch of Grant Morrison rarities, including Batman and Superman text stories from 1986 - two decades before he got to do definitive runs in the main titles - and Alan Moore interviewed on the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Obama, and his grimoire-in-progress:
"We want it to be a lot of fun and we also want it to be exactly like the way you would have imagined a book to magic to be when you were a small child and had first heard of such things."
As someone who has attempted to read Crowley, that sounds like just what Doctor Dee ordered.

I'd been looking forward to Tin Man, a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz starring Alan Cumming, Callum Keith Rennie and lovely, lovely Zooey Deschanel. Not only was I disappointed, but I don't even have much to add to USA Today's disappointment when they say that "Ambitious and intriguing though it may be, Tin Man is simply too long, too grim and too determined to impose a Lord of the Rings universe-saving quest on top of a simpler, gentler story." It perhaps doesn't help that Alan Moore so recently finished showing how you could reinvent that story to a darker end, so long as you had a point, rather than just mashing together various fashionable SF and fantasy tropes into a world with no thematic consistency or resonance, much less plausibility.

Anyone know how to find the Search toolbar in Mediaplayer? I didn't even know there was one, but having seen it in action I want it, yet am experiencing IT Fail in finding it. Hurrah for pressing random buttons.

I was unaware until I happened past it on Tuesday, but there's a new Book & Comic Exchange branch in Soho, just up from the MVE on Berwick Street. Which isn't quite so bursting-at-the-seams as Notting Hill yet, but I still got a pretty good haul - the Spider-Man's Tangled Web collection with the Garth Ennis/John McCrea and Peter Milligan/Duncan Fegredo stories for £3, the one issue I was missing from the Morrison/Millar Flash run (a rather lovely Jay Garrick one-shot, 'Still Life In The Fast Lane'), and an issue of Warren Ellis' Doctor Strange run. Except it turns out he only did plot, not script, and what's the point of a Warren Ellis comic without inventive insults? The whole thing is a bit of a mess, though, even with some of the art coming from Mark Buckingham; it was part of the Marvel Edge line, which was Marvel's attempt to get some of that Vertigo action, which is here represented by such cringeworthy details as Strange's cloak being replaced with an Overcoat of Levitation...
I was in that neck of the woods because I'd been invited to lunch at a health food place in Covent Garden. Accepting which, and then being off the sauce all day, was clearly foolishness, because last night I was quite as ill as I've been in years. ( TMI ) And of course, when your time's your own then sick days lack even the compensatory charms they hold for workers.
Before this kicked in, though, I also had chance to make my first visit to the Wallace Collection, which I think maybe made a better home than it makes a museum. The stuff they have is generally the sort of stuff which makes for a good background, rather than something I wish to stand and contemplate - although the gender balance amuses me, rooms of arms and armour balanced by all that froofy Rococo stuff.

Won the pub quiz jackpot on Monday, but only just - we were exactly as far off the tie-break as one other team, and then in the tie-break tie-break, which was essentially guessing a random date, we were only one day closer than them. Perhaps it was the tension of that which undid me last night? Nah, I'm still blaming the so-called healthy living.

edit: More comics news just in - DC Announces 'After Watchmen - What's Next?' Program? And it has been amazing me how the Watchmen trade is now *everywhere*, although that is a mainly happy amazement as opposed to some people's reaction, so this is a smart move. So what comics are DC suggesting as the next step?( Read more... )Whenever I think DC might be regaining some small fragment of the plot, they pull a stunt like this.

Why do people scurry? I've been noticing it a lot in these cold, foggy nights - people see me looming out of the haze, and they start scurrying - hunch shoulders, head down, pace uneasily quickened. Scurrying never helped anyone. I mean, I used to work with a guy who did it really badly, even in the office in the daytime, and even though I quite liked him and have never done anything of the sort in my life, I still had to clamp down on an atavistic reflex which wanted to mug him. And this guy was forever getting mugged, assaulted and what-have-you, to a degree which would be baffling if it weren't for the way he walked. Seriously, if you want to take evasive action - cross the road, speed up, whatever - then fine. In many circumstances, it might be the sensible thing to do. But for heavens' sake, do it with your head held high and your spine straight, because the minute you start scurrying, you look like prey. And if whoever's looming out of the fog is a predator, they will notice that, and you will have become one more contributor to the ranks of self-fulfilling prophecies.
(And not that I should have to say this, but this verges on certain sensitive issues so for the sake of clarity - no, this is not to even remotely absolve the predators and no, this is not to say that walking (apparently) unafraid is an entirely infallible strategy for avoiding harm. But it does work a lot better than scurrying)

Over-rated Fables scribe Bill Willingham has written a piece opposing grim'n'gritty 'superhero decadence', and arguing that ' the superhero genre should be “different, better, with higher standards, loftier ideals and a more virtuous — more American — point of view.”' Cue applauding comments from the sort of charmers who object to foreigners and non-white superheroes, or have plain creepy thoughts about Lois Lane, which for all Willingham's noted right-wing politics, is possibly not quite what he was getting at. More to the point, just as this C-lister is claiming that his own Elementals was one of the comics which kicked off the darker trend - a claim I've never seen from anyone but him - he's now acting as though he's the first to object to the trend, a trend he presents as still at its height through highly selective quoting of recent comics and films. Alan Moore - who alongside Frank Miller and maybe Howard Chaykin, *actually* started grim and gritty - has been saying for years that it got silly, that comics have had enough solve and now need a little coagula (or as the less alchemical* might put it, enough deconstruction and now need some reconstruction). Grant Morrison has been arguing something similar since at least Flex Mentallo, whose final issue was meant to be taking us past the Dark Age and into the Neon Age; you could argue that Final Crisis shows a funny way of going about this agenda, but All Star Superman was as purestrain heroic as the Superman comics Willingham seems to want, even if it was perhaps a little lacking in USA! USA! jingoism for his tastes.

*Speaking of alchemy, I never mentioned anything about Foucault's Pendulum on here, did I? From now on, I'm going to tell every conspiracy theorist I meet to read that book before they try it on with their controlled-demolition-of-Twin-Towers crap. Because even if it doesn't convince them - and part of the dark beauty of a real conspiracy mindset is, nothing will - then 650 pages should buy me a fair period of peace.

The weather has been very extreme lately, hasn't it? By which I don't just mean the obvious cold, though that has at times been too much even for me, and that's rare in London. I mean how on Wednesday night the moisture in the air turned each streetlight into a little sun, so bright and burning I had to keep my eyes low. I mean how yesterday from the Crouch End rail bridge, the clouds in the sky over Archway looked like the work of one of the better 18th century landscape painters. I mean how yesterday was so Victorian-ly foggy that seeing Steve 586 with a copy of From Hell under his arm at the 18 Carat Love Affair gig gave me a brief flash of genuine fright before I started grinning.

Am three episodes into the third season of Battlestar Galactica (yes, late, I know), with the brave human insurgents finding they have no other option but to launch suicide bombing campaigns against the Cylon oppressors, and the Cylons finding their good intentions fraying as they realise the humans don't want the salvation they're offering, and I'm wondering why non-genre fiction and TV so seldom manages anything this relevant. Like, when I read this fairly nothing article about how more modern fiction should be engaged with debt, I knew the guy was missing things, but I've just read the most perfect example, and it's something he's never going to read - Brubaker's The Death Of Captain America, in which the USA's crippling level of debt is part of the Red Skull's plan as surely as the assassination of Steve Rogers. Then tie in to that the debt Cap's old partners feel to him, the debt of politicians to those who paid for their campaigns...it's wonderfully done, and I say that as not that big a Brubaker fan in general. But even the sort of literary bod who's just open-minded enough to read black and white autobiographical crap and maybe even Watchmen is never going to read a Cap comic, so they'll never know.

There's a new shop opened on Stroud Green Road, with a discordant flashing red light loudly proclaiming
Acupuncture
Herbmedic
Massage
This disruptive establishment's name is Pure Harmony.

Can anyone find a definitive story on which version of Battlestar Galactica the lorry driver was watching at the wheel? Obviously there's no excuse for inattentive driving, but if he's hooked on the new version I can at least sympathise - whereas if he was watching the original, as some reports claim, then add bad taste to dangerous driving and throw away the key.

Went to that big Concrete and Glass festival last night. Well, sort of - I went to one venue right on the periphery where the only three bands who interested me* were very thoughtfully all playing not only in the same venue, but the same room. augstone and I attempted to take advantage of this by smuggling chairs into that room, but others, jealous of our seating, stood spitefully in front of us. Not a bad little venue, either - called the Brady Arts Centre. You could tell it didn't get used for many gigs, though; when I first walked in the lights were blinding, and you could smell the scorch as the dust burned off them, like the first time a radiator goes on in Autumn. They'd also had to bring in a bar - and not just cans, draught, but you could see the workings giving it a splendid mad scientist's lab feel - "You call me mad? I, who have created pints?" And they were using the bottom drawer of a fridge for the cashbox. A sign on the door to the garden said children shouldn't play unsupervised, because there was an open pond; I went out looking for it, didn't find it and was briefly locked out.
Weird being in Whitechapel a day after playing binge catch-up on Warren Ellis' Freakangels.

I've been reading two biographies of peculiar writers, AJA Symons' The Quest for Corvo and Steve Aylett's Lint. Though written 70 years apart, they have a lot in common. Both writers, like so many, struggled to find success during their lifetime - something one cannot in all honestly be completely surprised at given the work. Lint's novels included I Blame Ferns, Nose Furnace and Sadly Disappointed (about a child who is not possessed by the devil); he was also the writer of the short-lived TV show Catty and the Major and the seventies comic The Caterer. Corvo wrote historical romances, translations from languages in which he was not fluent and a history of the Borgias in which he refused to use the word 'poison' and which he eventually disowned in an argument over grammar, but is best known for Hadrian the Seventh, a book in which his Mary Sue becomes Pope and saves the world, the efforts of thinly-disguised versions of his enemies notwithstanding. On which note, both had a knack for making enemies. Lint favoured the principle of 'effortless incitement', by which he was able to provoke violence even in casual passers-by, but was the subject of particular loathing from the critic and dullard Cameo Herzog (author of the Empty Trumpet books); Corvo had a spectacular feud with the Aberdeen Free Press, but beyond that was convinced that all the forces of the Catholick Church were arrayed against him (he had failed in two early bids for the priesthood, in spite of a liking for young boys). Of course, upon their deaths such enemies as had outlived them were quick to change their tune and hail their genius - something which threw several of Lint's enemies given the persistent 'Lint is dead' rumours during his lifetime. Both cut odd figures - "Lint filled the room like a buffalo, with a haircut like a Rolodex and a greying beard like a surf explosion", while Corvo described himself as a "haggard shabby shy priestly-visaged individual". Corvo claimed to have invented colour photography; from childhood Lint was obsessed with the search for new and unnamed colours. Both have been survived by their work (and in Corvo's case by his handwriting), leading to small sodalities of devotees - Stephen Fry is among Corvo's fans, while Alan Moore gives a rave review of Lint on the back of Aylett's book. Lint, described by Gore Vidal as "entering the world of letters like a fat man jumping into a swimming pool", died while writing his thankfully incomplete attempt at autobiography, The Man Who Gave Birth To His Arse; Corvo left the scandalous The Desire And Pursuit Of The Whole, having earlier declared "I am now simply engaged in dying as slowly and as publicly and as annoyingly to all of you professing and non-practising friends of mine as possible", attempted to commit suicide by gondola and then threatened to publish an edition of pornography in the names of his enemies (their crime, for the most part, that they declined to 'lend' him further money once it became clear that they were never going to get the last lot back).
Neither of these men is quite plausible, but one of them is real.

"Oddly inspiring and supremely pointless" - Andrew from Swimmer One interviews Bill Drummond.

Bran Mak Morn - the movie. With a Solomon Kane film also in the works, could it be that one day not that far away, Robert E Howard will no longer just be known as 'the Conan guy'?
(The director's past work does not enthuse me, it's true, but he does mention that he's also a fan of Slaine)

*Flipron, (The Real) Tuesday Weld and Mr Solo, whose band now contains more people than David Devant. All very good, obv.

It's remarkably civilised of ITV to put all their halfway-watchable shows in the same 90 minute block. Secret Diary of a Call Girl was always borderline, and now they're deviating from the book even more, not just normalising Belle but embroiling her in lamely generic plots about proteges and politicians - plus, the director seems increasingly inept at hiding the use of body doubles. Nonetheless, it's better than anything else ITV squeeze out, or would be if tomorrow it weren't followed by the debut of No Heroics. I haven't seen it yet, but it stars Nathan Barley and James Lance and is set in a pub for off-duty superheroes where the drinks include V For Vodka and Shazamstell, and thus even with ITV's reverse Midas touch in the equation, it basically can't fail. Then after that, Entourage, which is still ludicrous fluff, and still utterly wonderful. No need to check the rest of the schedules! And no need to bother with ITV1 at all, thank heavens.

How can people say there are no good band names left in a world with Adebisi Shank? If you don't agree, you presumably haven't seen Oz, and if you haven't seen Oz, that's between you and your conscience.

As much as I love Saint Etienne, neither of the times I've seen them before convinced me. But context counts for a lot; they're the sound of London on a good day, of the retro-futuristic spirit that gave the city things like the South Bank. So walking down from Bloomsbury and through the Thames Festival, with its gay Aztecs and giant butterflies and Lithuanian folk-dancers, and the show being in the Queen Elizabeth Hall (where Sarah incites quite the most polite insurrection I've ever seen, encouraging dancing in the aisles)...it helps them make sense live like they do on record. And well done Heavenly for managing to turn the foyer into a plausibly clubby space, too.
It was a strange weekend; even more than usual I was beset by the mutterings of whichever church father it was who lamented "Oh, that we had spent but one day in this world thoroughly well." Not that I think his idea of time well spent would have much in common with mine, but that line haunts me nonetheless. And this in spite of participating in a sitcom read-through accompanied by experimental booze science, getting some sewing done which I'd been putting off for months, a wonderful birthday dinner for a dear friend on Saturday...not such a wasted weekend as all that, but at my back I always hear, &c. There's a thought - the Marvell expert was out on Saturday, maybe it was his fault.
Oh, and sun dogs! Perfect examples, on the very day when I'd been reading the chapter of The Cloud-Spotter's Guide about them. While admiring which I was accosted by two antipodeans who wanted to borrow my mobile in exactly the sort of scenario which could have been a scam - but wasn't, thus restoring some fragment of my faith in humanity.

Speaking of faith in humanity - I enjoyed John Scalzi's future war novel Old Man's War, but thus far I like the sequel The Ghost Brigades even better. Partly this is because it answers some niggling questions I had about the setting - questions which weren't explicitly set up as mysteries and could simply have been inconsistencies. But more than that for its sheer ruthlessness, its recognition that when faced with a populous and implacable galaxy, humanity's greatest resource is that we are utter bastards. Of course, this is also why in reality, and even in my very favourite fiction, I would much rather we were just used as attack dogs in a galactic civilisation run by something halfway civilised, because the idea of trusting us to run the show is terrifying. But for the odd pulp thrill, Humans Versus The Galaxy has its charms.
(You might not expect a segue from that to the Lib Dem conference. But when Nick Clegg, name notwithstanding, says "most people, most of the time, will do the right thing"...I wonder whether he's grown up with the same human race I have, and even more than with his plans for tax cuts, I fear that his party is just too far away from anything I believe nowadays for me to vote for them in good conscience. On the other hand, he's dead right about the zombies and the Andrex puppy)

...which title I pick not just because the song's been stuck in my head since Saturday's Prom Night, but because the first issue of Grant Morrison's 'Superman Beyond 3D' is the comic I was hoping and expecting Final Crisis would be. Only in one spread does the 3D effect have quite the same mind-twisting force as it did in the Blazing World scenes of Alan Moore's Black Dossier, but even if for the rest of the issue it's just a gimmick then hey, 3D is a pretty cool gimmick. And this...this is what I want from a Grant Morrison Event. Dead worlds! Limbo! Dr Manhattan with the serial numbers filed off! Cross-time lunacy and alternate heroes and giant crashing spaceships and only Superman left to save the day. It's as if Levitzseid has got Grant enchained at the heart of his monstrous engine of destruction, perverting his mighty Morrison powers in the furtherance of DC's Anti-Fun Equation...but Grant's too good to go down without a fight, and so by some ludicrous contrivance freed an aspect of himself to write a good Final Crisis comic.
The second best comic of last week, incidentally, was the conclusion to Book One of Warren Ellis' Doktor Sleepless. Just when I was worried we were getting a Planetary-style loss of focus, it turns out that the mysticism and the techno-evangelism have a perfectly sensible reason for being in the same book. I think we were perhaps meant to come away from the book with the idea that Doktor Sleepless is not the hero after all; personally, I'm backing him all the way.

Speaking of mad science: never mind the cure for cancer - isn't unlocking telomere structure the first step on the road to immortality in the Fall Revolution books?

Finally got round to watching Brokeback Mountain on Sunday - yes, I know, I fail at gay. I was a bit puzzled at first; I was expecting it to be one of those manly American buddy movies where you're thinking guys, just bone already - except then they do. But whether this was intended or not, I really didn't feel any chemistry off them until it happened. Which worked, I think. As did the scenery, obviously; I'm sure if that hadn't been so beautifully, expansively shot then the film would never have been able to cross over to the extent that it did. I wasn't convinced by the flashbacks - I thought they upset a flow which was otherwise brilliantly established - but otherwise, it's just such a well-judged film. Details which don't sit right at first (are the women being deliberately established as deadening forces, in the manner beloved of misogynist homosexuals?) come clear in time: it's not that the women are dead hands, it's that society is. A homophobic rural society especially, but not exclusively; even if Jack and Ennis had settled down somewhere nice and friendly just outside San Francisco, the mere fact of domesticity would mean what they had couldn't stay as pure as it was when it was born up on Brokeback Mountain.
(For another consideration of how uneasily passion sits in a mundane world, consider My Zinc Bed, which features excellent performances from Jonathan Pryce and Paddy Considine, and a rather strange accent from Uma Thurman. Of course, neither of these made me cry a fraction as much as Kiki's Delivery Service; I already know how malformed this world is, it's seeing the contrast of what a decent one would be like which breaks me down)

Spent the Bank Holiday weekend strung out along the 253 route as was - well, with one brief jaunt up to the asylum, but other than that - Bethnal Green, Clapton, Seven Sisters Road, Camden. All very jolly but I was especially glad to have Black Plastic back, rocking and packed. Visually, the erstwhile Pleasure Unit is somewhat less of a dive than previously, although they seriously need to sort out the smell. If only people could try to burn it off, it might help - particularly if the burning items were also themselves fragranced, perhaps?
And I've finished London - City of Disappearances. Which feels strange - it's such a capacious book, so it feels a little like finishing an encyclopaedia, or the dictionary. Appropriate, I suppose, given I am about to take a little break from London - though having also just finished Wodehouse's last novel, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, I'm wary of expecting too much calm and restoration from my West Country retreat.

Frustrating though it is that HBO's post-western epic Deadwood never got a proper resolution, in some ways it works out rather well. ( oblique spoilers )
And that, right there, is the birth of America, isn't it? Which is what the series was always about. Hell, you could argue HBO did give us the sequel; once we've seen how the last great attempt at founding a new society was finally bought and buried, all we need to do is spin forward 130 years to watch The Wire and see the long, drawn-out death throes implicit in that stymied birth.
(I got the impression ahead of time that Deadwood's third season was not so well-regarded as the rest; having watched it, I'm at a loss as to why that might be, and of course now I'm not scared of their spoilers, those negative reviews at which I could barely glanced have learned the ways of church mice. Perhaps it was the players, the fire-engine, the loosely-attached subplots of no immediately obvious relevance to the show's main thrust. I rather liked them, myself - they made it the story of a community, not just of the community's leaders)
And with that finished, I'm into a rather different TV proposition: Justice League Unlimited. I love that popular culture has got to the point where Aztek and Alan Moore stories are considered appropriate fodder for children's television.

Hamfatter - yes, I know they went on Dragon's Den to get funding, but they're not that bad, are they? Not great, but in the pop-bands-with-guitars field, one of the less offensive examples.

Am not convinced by the latest rejig of 2000AD's monthly sibling, the Megazine. Packaging it with a slim reprint edition is not an inherently bad idea - but the price has gone up from £2.99 to £4.99, and next week's accompanying reprint is Snow/Tiger, a perfectly good strip but also a very recent one which, like many readers, I already own in the weeklies. And while it's good, I'm not sure it's so good that I can use a surplus copy for comics evangelism, y'know?

The Dark Knight is not, contra IMDB, the best film ever (but then look what they've got at #2 - ugh!). It's not even the best film about a non-powered billionaire playboy superhero released this year - Robert Downey Jr is Stark is Iron Man, whereas Christian Bale, though he plays a brilliant Bruce Wayne, only in the car chase and the climactic fight ever convinced me he was Batman, as opposed to just a guy in a Batman suit. It is, however, bloody good. All this talk of a posthumous Oscar for Heath Ledger - well, I'd approve, obviously, because it'd be an Oscar going to a frakking SUPERVILLAIN as against some sententious middlebrow issue movie, and because his death-by-Method would really raise the bar next time Tom Hanks or similar git wants a cheap win by playing a retard - "No, sorry Tom, these days that would actually require you to suffer severe brain damage". Well, I'd be happy to help 'coach' him with an iron bar...but I digress. Heath Ledger plays a damn fine Joker, drawing on both 'The Killing Joke' and Arkham Asylum and managing that rare feat of actually making him *funny*, as against a Stalin whose crap jokes you laugh at because otherwise he'll kill you. But this is not his film, it's Aaron Eckhart's; this is Harvey Dent's story and he plays a better Dent than I think I ever saw the comics manage.
( minor spoilers )

Went to have a look at Burne-Jones' Sleep of Arthur in Avalon at the Tate yesterday. Obviously he's my King in a way no Windsor could ever be, but I was still reminded that Burne-Jones is really not my favourite pre-Raphaelite; this painting is acknowledged unfinished, but set against Rossetti or Millais or Waterhouse (as he is in the Tate) his works all look a little that way, lacking some final glaze - or the breath of life - to really give that great pre-Raphaelite impression of being a glance though some charmed casement into faerie.
(They've also got Flaming June in from the same lender - both the paintings are in the free access areas so if you're a fan, drop in, but be warned their lighting is still atrocious, reflection and glint all over the place. Also, there's some asinine Martin Creed conceptual piece going on next door which as so often, is based on an OK idea but not really thought through)

Club night becomes religion to dodge anti-flyering byelaw.

I didn't even know there was a film adaptation of Jan Potocki's Manuscript found in Saragossa until I saw the DVD at my parents'; they had never heard of the book and had just had the DVD pressed on them by a friend. Neil Gaiman summarises the book better than I could; the film manages a remarkably full and faithful adaptation of this bizarre mish-mash of a book, getting the Goya-style chills and the absurdist sitcom in there as close as can be. Apparently lead actor Zbigniew Cybulski was considered 'Poland's James Dean' - which shows you how bad things must have been behind the Iron Curtain, 'cos to me he's more Brendan Fraser meets David Mitchell. Fortunately, that's just what you want in Alphonse van Worden.