Possibly I'm just biased against Logan's Run because I'm 31 and was watching it with a 22-year old. But it really is very silly, isn't it? I mean, even if one takes as given the whole futuristic-utopia-maintained-by-killing-everyone-at-30 bit...why are all of the Sandmen who enforce this situation such abysmal shots? How can a robot which is following its programming but with unforeseen consequences end up cackling maniacally when this results in threats to people, when surely it should be going about its business calmly because it believes it is doing its normal routine? And once again, one feels comparatively mild about the Blue Screen of Death and its compatriots when one sees once more how people in the future thought computers would crash, ie, give it one 'does not compute' and the entire city explodes.
Lovely design work, though. And Jenny Agutter was very pretty. Michael York less so, but I think that was mainly the haircut.
In other age-related news, circa 5pm today I mark my gigasecond. Being alive for a billion seconds probably only feels like a landmark if you read a certain school of science fiction (I first encountered it in the works of Charles Stross), but still...a billion anythings is a lot, isn't it?

SB aside, I haven't mentioned my weekend. Well, by way of a handy reminder that London still has other clubs which feel like home, Friday was Poptimism, at which I was particularly glad to hear Pet Shop Boys' much-underplayed 'Flamboyant'. On the way down, I passed the Fourth Plinth for the first time since they started putting people on it; there was a woman in a safari shirt with two cuddly toys and a sign reading DAKTARI. I hoped she might be reenacting episodes but turns out just to be the name of some sanctuary for which she was raising awareness. That net around the plinth really spoils the effect, doesn't it? Good old 'health and safety'. See also the decision that the ground floor of the Fullback's Ewok Village is 'substantially enclosed', ie not rainy and windy enough to be a legitimate smoking area.
Sunday was understandabaly less active, spent mostly reading crime comics and listening to jangly indie

Why are there so many T-shirts around for the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, which has been pretty much universally panned? If this is viral marketing, is it paid, or are some people just really desperate for free Ts? I mean, they don't look like derelicts.

The Bacchae opens with Alan Cumming's arse descending from the heavens, upside down. And a very nice arse it is too, so fair enough. All these centuries on, Greek tragedies are a damned hard thing to get right; if you've never seen a cod-Shakespearean translation staged with dusty solemnity by an am dram shambles, then count yourself lucky. You need to balance the stage as the distant place in which the story unfolds, and the stage as the platform from which a speaker interacts with the audience. You need to balance the alien with the intimate, and only an incredibly rare director will be able to do both sides full justice. So maybe this production doesn't quite capture the strangeness and the terror - the music for the Bacchae's chants would need to be catchier for that, and just generally *more* - but it has the intimacy, the immediacy. And that's all down to Cumming, and the masterstroke of playing Dionysus as a pantomime character. Or two, perhaps - he's a hybrid of the Dame and the Principal Boy. I suppose he's the father of carnival, isn't he? So they're both his children, no wonder if we should think he resembles them both when really it's the other way around. And at times the staging catches glimpses of his power - you can feel the flames which burn Thebes, and the light when he appears in all his pomp is genuinely dazzling.
Translator David Greig has his tone about right (I particularly like his use of 'The Scream' rather than 'The Roarer' as one of the god's names). It's a long time since I read the play, but I don't recall it being quite so one-sided when I did - or rather, I knew that *I* was entirely on Dionysus' side, but I thought that was as much me as the text. Now...well, as Greig says, "There are still men who would control women in order to bolster their shaky sense of self. There are still men who are lost because they refuse to lose themselves in dance." He could add that some such men are also obsessed with male pride, and absolutely petrified of alcohol and 'corrupting influences' of the wider society, just like Pentheus. So for all that I liked Pentheus as the no-nonsense Scot unaware what a nonsense it is to resist Dionysus, I think the times and the translation would have been better served by dressing him as an imam.
My biggest problem with the play, though, is one I'm sure was in the text, but which I never really noticed, because when you're reading a play, you can...if not skim the bits you don't enjoy, then at least read them faster. Staged in front of you, there's no fast forward. Once Pentheus gets his come-uppance, once the others who slighted Dionysus and his mother get their just desserts, they don't half spend a while wailing about it. Look - I don't care. You were idiots. You had warnings, and still you stood against a god - and not just any god, but an incredibly cool god. Now you have been destroyed, as puny humans will be in such circumstances. And you were miserable sods, so I'm glad. Where's the tragedy? This isn't Shakespeare, or even Sophocles, where people are trapped impossibly between contradictory imperatives which must all be honoured. This is more like the end of The Wicker Man - ie, party time.

Speaking of puny humans, a marvellous quote I keep forgetting to post:
"At moments like this I hate being an unreconstructed human - an island of thinking jelly trapped in a bony carapace, endless miliseconds away from its lovers, forced to squeeze every meaning through a low-bandwidth speech channel. All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night."
- Charles Stross, Glasshouse. The speaker is a future human used to being able to swap bodies quicker than we'd swap outfits, confined by lunatics to a normal human body in a re-creation of the 1950-2050 Dark Age.

Fosca's supports gave the impression of having been booked with the specific aim of making Fosca look like Lordi in comparison. Of the various flavours of tweeness on offer, I missed most of The Parallelograms, and was a bit disappointed with The Besties (Bis if they'd been hit with a Fey Ray. As opposed to Bis being hit with Fay Wray, which could at least make you some money on specialist internet sites). A Smile And A Ribbon, though, were very sweet. They appeared to have a song about Darren Hayman from Hefner; even if they didn't, the fact that I could seriously entertain the notion that they might should give you some idea what sort of thing we're talking about. Adorable, and wry, and soppy in a good way. I approve. Fosca themselves...they seemed to be having a whale of a time, but I felt Kate's absence pretty keenly, and ultimately I don't think this side of Fosca is quite the Fosca I love.
On the way down, a bunch of 'singing' christians at Vauxhall (and would such a loud massed performance have been allowed to persist so long by a non-monotheist group, I wonder?) obliged me to start in on the Sebastian Horsley autobiography while I waited for a bus, simply because it was *obviously* degenerate. A mild annoyance, as I'm deep into my main book of the moment, Accelerando, whose cover is fairly innocuous even if the content is anything but. Put it this way: Warren Ellis is acknowledged for having looked at the early drafts, and now all the near-future infoSF stuff he's been doing lately feels to me like the pumped-up, dumbed-down version of this. The ideas are fizzing off the page, and most of the time I can follow just enough of them to keep up, but only while riding a vertiginous sense of future shock and information burn. Which is, of course, a sign that form and content have been perfectly married, because that's what the book's about - the transition to the future. Although, as Stross has pointed out elsewhere, things are already changing so fast that if you want to write something people can follow and engage with, you have to damp down the novelty rate; even this much chaos is muffled. And even this recent and this smart a book has started looking dated in places; there's pretty much zero chance that the next US president will be more morally conservative than this one, and oil at 80 euros a barrel in the 2020s isn't so shocking when it nudged past $78 this week.
So, given what a linguistic sponge I am, I apologise in advance if I start dropping the jargon of a cyberpunk tosser over the next few weeks, especially since it might be mixed in with Baltimore street speak, because I've started watching the fourth season of The Wire online, which itself would have seemed madly futuristic, what, two years ago?
And Accelerando is also implying a possibility as to why modern economics are the one thing which, no matter how many times I try to wrap my brain around them, I simply don't get. Because whether we're heading for Accelerando's future or just a collapse, they aren't going to be around much longer; so in among its various handy (and occasionally otherwise) amendments, perhaps my head just doesn't feel it can justify allocating that much processing power and memory to an obsolescent discipline?