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.

Lots of comedians this weekend, and I don't just mean the nine-strong troupe last night, fostering a convivial atmosphere even though they were playing a room which also contained chocolate wine. On Friday the Curious Orange came into Gosh, when I was already on a bit of a high from being told that for reasons which remain opaque to me, there's a signed Miracleman print with my name quite literally on it, free of charge*. And on Saturday, at the Ivy, just when we were beginning to think the whole place was people wanting to be mistaken for celebrities rather than the 'real' thing, who should be placed at the next table but Ricky Gervais and companion, both looking miserable as virtue. Should you ever be at the Ivy, incidentally, I can recommend the pumpkin gnocchi.

Also on Friday, well, I suppose you could link this to comedy, because the idea was that I should spin a pop set! Not that I don't like pop, you understand, I just have somewhat erratic ideas on what constitutes a dancefloor classic. I'd brought along a grab bag of ideas, and the preceding set by ursarctous had included three tracks I'd been considering ('Song 4 Mutya', Robyn and 'I Told Her On Alderaan' so that at least narrowed my options to a more manageable level. Specifically:
( Beautiful robots, dancing alone )
After some early panic (I'd played two Number Ones and the new Girls Aloud single, what more did people want from me, blood?) the slightly self-indulgent PSB choice got people on the floor for the rest of the set. Yay for self-indulgence.

Have finally seen Sunset Boulevard, and the only thing that's stopped me quoting it all weekend is that I also received a book with the tagline "Your Galaxy Is Toast, Monkey Boys!" But what a classic, ahead of The Player and Entourage in getting Hollywood to gleefully skewer its own, and more savage and true and beautiful than either still. I know it's popular on stage too, but for me it has to be a film, and a film with the cast playing themselves - Gloria Swanson the old silent star with Erich von Stroheim reduced to her butler (and isn't Greed still lost, his reputation still a phantom?), watching a film they really made together, him in his own clothes. Buster Keaton and the other 'waxworks'. Hedda Hopper and Mr de Mille as themselves, the latter using his real nickname for her. So much reality, yet so far from the sort of tiresome 'realism' which usually just means 'dullness'. And it put me in just the right mood for some Max Beerbohm today, similarly metatextual hilarity at the expense of the arts, albeit literary ones in his case, read in the park interspersed with bits of the paper, before heading off to see if there are any ducklings about (answer: not yet, but I did see some scruffy young coots, which probably aren't called cootlets, but should be).

*Not a bad comics haul, either - only four issues but each of them a gem. ( comics stuff, some Spidey spoilers )
**angelv later played the Rialto song of the same name; I honestly don't know which of them is better.

May have mentioned this before, but I'd have a lot more time for christianity if they made something of today. At present it's the awkward, slightly embarrassed non-Bank-Holiday of the weekend, in spite of marking the best bit of the story - the Harrowing of Hell. Where Jesus goes down to the Inferno, and busts out all the righteous men who lived before he came. I mean, sod Mel Gibson's SM epic, this is the Jesus film I'd watch. Think the prison break from Watchmen, but with Jesus as Nite Owl, the Holy Ghost as Silk Spectre and Moses as Rorschach. Plus demons.
Today also marks 383 years since Sir Francis 'Not That One' Bacon caught his death of cold by stuffing a chicken with snow - which I now discover took place on a journey between Gray's Inn and Highgate, ie very possibly along the Holloway Road. Last night I too faced a bathetic yet appalling incident on the Holloway Road, to wit, a Brummie ZZ Top covers band polluting Big Red, and not even playing the good songs. So we pissed off to another pub where the only distraction was the BBC showing of The Others, which we loudly spoilered before realising that some of the patrons in the other room were properly watching it. However, when the end was reached, they appeared not to have registered our unwitting intrusion. Possibly ( spoilers ) Or possibly they were just drunk.

This evening: Doctor Who, The Indelicates and Mr Solo. Which between them are keeping me going though the morning oppresses with a quite supernal greyness.

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.

Skins is set at the outset of sexual life, the Peter O'Toole film Venus at its end. But watching the two back to back on Thursday night, it was the correspondences I could see. Yes, that episode was largely Election with added Father Dougal, Art Brut and teenage sapphism, but it was also about the stupid, humiliating things the bewitched will do for beauty (shorn of the gender stereotyping Hanif Kureishi either displays, or allows his lead to display, in Venus, where O'Toole's Maurice suggests that while a naked woman is the most beautiful thing most men will ever see, for women it's their first child). And while the Freddy/Cook/JJ plotline was sidelined this Skins, you see that same sense of toxic male friendship in Venus when Maurice and his old muckers meet in the cafe each day, Maurice still trying it on with people his chums consider off-limits just like Cook would. Albeit with considerably more charm, obviously, because Maurice is Peter O'bloody Toole, isn't he? Pretty much playing himself, with admirable self-awareness (an actor who has cornered the market in corpses); beyond that, playing the himself he played in Russell T Davies' Casanova, the old roue not quite prepared to admit that the game is over and Time won.
(Speaking of Time - Peep Show being a comedy of my generation, how terrifying to see its love object, tarnished as she may there be, now playing the mother of a teenage lead character in Skins)

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.

Greatly enjoyed Stay Beautiful on Saturday, though it's strange being at the eighth birthday when you remember the first night so clearly, feeling like some sort of elder statesman of glitter, even down to being startled at the younger generation's excitement over the Powerpuff Girls theme because it's slipped your mind that it doesn't get a regular airing anymore...

Julien Temple's Pandaemonium has little on its Wikipedia or IMDB pages to flag it up as Romantic Poetry - the Hollywood Years, but by blazes it should. All IMDB manages is to flag up the anachronistic jet-trails in the sky during the balloon ride, having perhaps not also spotted various other modern features throughout the film, intended to convey a sense of Coleridge as a prophet whose visionary powers (and opium habit) cast him loose from time - even though the opening scene says as much, explicitly, in among some astonishing camerawork. And there is a lot of that, and it does make a change from the normal slavish biopic template of which I am so, so bored. But plotwise...Linus Roache's Coleridge is the brave rebel, undone by opium but still a visionary hero - no mention here of that government job in Malta, or of the boringly conventional strain in his criticism. John Hannah's Wordsworth is a vindictive hack, almost incapable of writing - even 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' is here his sister's suggestion. Wordsworth is the person from Porlock and, not content with that, later convinces Coleridge to burn 'Kubla Khan' in spite of Lord Byron's efforts to huy and publish it. But! All is well. For Wordsworth's loyal sister, although also reduced to a wreck by the dastardly sell-out, remembers the poem in its entirety! In your face, Wordsworth! Of course, to better emphasise the picture we get no quotes from Wordsworth's few genuinely great poems, while all the Coleridge quotations are from two of the three masterpieces he produced over a poetic career which was broadly acceptable but unexceptional.
There is a grand tale to be told in the relationship of Wordsworth and Coleridge - I picture something like HBO's John Adams. This hero vs villain melodrama is not it. Although it turns out that the bit about Southey writing the original Goldilocks story is pretty much true. Who knew?

Have never quite known whether I should investigate the works of WG Sebald. I like psychogeographical odysseys - but these ones get good reviews in the literary pages, such that I suspect them, and the tone of self-indulgent wispiness which seems to get literary fiction types all hot under the collar sounds stronger here than elsewhere in the genre. Will Self's short essay on Sebald would, I hoped, decide me one way or the other, but no. still up in the air. And in a world with so many books, when you can't decide whether you're likely to like one, then it's better to read one you're pretty sure you will. Once I'm finished on the current crop of books - and that could take a while - I think it's flying cities in space for me, rather than lonely trudges around East Anglia.

I don't think last night's vile weather can have helped the turn-out for Fosca's last hurrah; as I quited to a couple of the band, "You can spend your whole life trying to be popular but, at the end of the day, the size of the crowd at your funeral will be largely dictated by the weather." Not that Fosca did ever try that hard to be popular; they only mattered to those to whom they mattered, and it was better that way. I'm not entirely convinced that they're a band that need three guitars - indeed, I'm not entirely convinced that any band does - but it was still good to hear the old favourites one more time, and the two new tracks a first and last time - including an intriguing new 2 Tone direction on one. I'll miss them; I've got too few bands left to go see these days.
A less loving farewell earlier in the day: went to see what was to be seen at Woolworths. A shop I often found very useful in my Cambridge days, but which for years now has always reeked of desperation - and doubly so now. I was expecting to come away with some tat by way of a memento, but no...the reductions weren't all that, and even had they been...Donna Noble and variant Ood toys. Transformers you've never heard of. Films you already own in those ill-conceived boxes with other films which might share a genre but which you genuinely hope never to see. And that was the good stuff. My MP3 player, aptly, was playing We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank.

Bad Santa is one of those films which hasn't learned from the advance I've previously mentioned in American comedies, the one where plot is now pretty much optional. In so far as the film is Billy Bob Thornton in a Santa suit, swearing, cussing, fornicating and so forth - brilliant. But then they have to go and spoil it by bolting on a bloody 'character arc'. Do Not Want.

I had always thought that, while Noam Chomsky is a disgusting joke as a political philosopher, it sounded as though he was a pretty good linguist before he got seduced by the charms of pronouncing beyond his expertise; it's a situation I'd seen plenty of times in literary theory, where someone who's OK on their own turf wanders into literature and starts embarrassing themselves, yet is somehow welcomed because their external authority feels like some kind of validation. Anyway, turns out he's also a rubbish linguist, because an Amazon tribe called the Piraha have a language which violates many of his supposed universals. Of course, he'll probably just claim they're an imperialist plot to discredit him.

I like climbing things. If you've ever been in a park with me, you probably already know that. And while I find all the fuss made about 'parkour' deeply naff, if I'm walking alongside a low wall, I'll as likely as not hop up and walk along it instead. This goes for the middle of the day and sober as much as the evening drunk; it's not a big deal so much as 'why not?'. Similarly, if I'm walking alongside a slope I usually try that thing of running at it and then along it where you don't fall off so long as you keep going.
Last night, I got overambitious and thought I could do this with a vertical wall. While wearing shoes with pretty much no grip. It may come as no surprise to you, dear readers, that I failed, resulting in an ungainly sprawl. But as I attempted it, I was so sure I could do it, the sort of certainty which really ought to be its own guarantee, if the world were as susceptible to will and confidence as they say it is.

Five Thoughts On The Popularity Of Steampunk.

As much as I love Bill Murray, I'd always put off seeing Groundhog Day because it is a film in which he finds love with Andie Macdowell, and (except in the grossly underrated Hudson Hawk), I loathe Andie Macdowell. Watching the film, though, it becomes clear that we're not seeing every iteration of Bill Murray's looped day. As such, it becomes easier to reconcile yourself to the horrific idea that he can only escape by romancing the vile woman. Clearly he has already killed her in every manner for which Puxsatawny can supply the materials - only to find himself waking up on the same morning. Similarly, he has also slept with every other inhabitant of the town, including the groundhog - and still not escaped. From which it becomes clear that even though she's unaccountably the hardest work of them all, even though the idea is repugnant beyond all measure, the malign forces which have trapped Murray will only be satisfied with the most abject act imaginable - he has to get with Macdowell.
So yes, he may wake up next to her, smiling. But it is the smile of a broken man. He has now known the true horror of the cosmos, the depths to which the secret rulers of the world will drive a man. The only question is which comes first for him now - catatonic insanity, or one final, mercifully-permanent suicide.

The Beautiful And Damned is not the club it was with Dickon at the helm, and you can take that in the broadest sense. The night as I knew it was a pub where strange and wonderful things happened, with dancing; now it's more a show. It has found itself a new audience who seem happy with that, but one gets the unhappy impression that certain elements here are that little bit too keen on The Mighty Boosh; I can forgive the compere introducing Martin White & his Mysterious Fax Machine, if only because that does sound like an act I'd like to see, but when he fluffs the name of the night (that pesky second 'the' creeps in, which is so easily done but entirely destroys the point of the phrase)...I can only take so much cheerful incompetence.
Martin White & his Mysterious Fax Machiney Fax Machine Orchestra, who seem still to have more members every time I see them, are worth the trip nonetheless; I especially enjoy their new Bond theme, undoubtedly the best song called 'Quantum of Solace' to be released this year by a man named White.

...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)

I still don't know quite what to say after the H Bird show. Obviously I knew it was going to be a night of top pop entertainment, and as bittersweet as a farewell show's always going to be, but I honestly wasn't expecting to get a song dedicated to me just for hectoring them all into playing a gig, much less a cover of my favourite Lifestyle song. Thank you, H Bird. You will be missed.
(There's always the possibility of a reunion show, of course. This was one, in a sense, but it felt like more of one; watching them on stage, they no longer seemed quite so in-the-same-band as they used to, and suddenly I had fully formed in my head the pop star biographies of what they've been up to in the meantime, biographies which were blithely heedless of my knowing mere facts to the contrary. augstone has seen a million faces and rocked them all, possibly in a stadium version of Rock Stone; ksta's soundtrack work led to her marrying a big Hollywood mogul type, I think a director; and hospitalsoup became a sort of Laurie Anderson experimental music figure)
Also a surprise: Mr Solo's support slot was not in fact solo, he performed as a double act with Eddie Argos! Which meant mixing a bit of Glam Chops material in there too, plus Art Brut's 'Moving to LA' for ksta. This made me very glad; since they cancelled their cancellation for tomorrow's SB, I was upset to be missing them on account of White Mischief (which reminds me - who else is going?). On top of which we got a Bowie/Ronson moment with a pink toy guitar, and a further guest on drums - John Moore (whose Bo Diddley tribute, incidentally, is the best one I've seen). Which I guess made them Glam Chops Recorder.

What else have I been up to lately? A pub quiz, with mixed results, after which I accidentally intimidated a hoodie. At Clockwork I was impressed by one comedian's Seal of Rassilon tattoo* and another's Harold Shipman impression. On the screen, I was unimpressed by the original Deneuve Belle de Jour and vampire superhero sequel Blade: Trinity. Which may seem like very different films, but have strangely similar flaws - a lead who's restrained to the point of near absence, and hideous editing. It could also be noted that I liked both of the Daywalker's previous films; similarly, I liked the writing of Belle's namesake.

After a promising start, Marvel's Secret Invasion seems to be getting very bogged down; this week's issue had one lovely scene on the helicarrier, but was otherwise far too obvious for an event which initially seemed to be all about cutting the ground from under our feet. Ultimate Origins, on the other hand...it's clearly the original creators of the Ultimate U showing all the clever stuff they had hidden before Jeph Loeb comes in and craps all over the place with Ultimatum, but none the worse for that. A little too decompressed, perhaps, but that was the fashion at the time. Covering surprisingly similar ground, the new issue of Garth Ennis' The Boys is one of the strongest since the DC issues; he seems to have got the pee po belly bum drawers bit out of his system and got back to the really nasty stuff: business.
Single best comic of the week, though: the final part of Drew Goddard's Buffy story. Just like the best episodes of the TV show, there's not a page allowed past without doing something either hilarious, awesome or heartbreaking. Sometimes more than one of the above.

Anyone else been getting Scientologist spam lately? Way to win people over, cretins.

*The one tat there was ever any remote chance of me getting; having been beaten to it reduces the chance from slim to none.

Does anybody happen to have a copy of Children of the Revolution? It's one of those offbeat comedies the Australians do so well, featuring several of the usual suspects - Rachel Griffiths, Sam Neill, Geoffrey Rush - and concerning Stalin's secret son growing up in Cold War Australia. I taped it off TV a couple of weeks back and, watching it on Monday, was really getting into it when the tape cut out; further investigation showed that the film had been pushed back by (what else?) sportism.

I like Richmond. Not its slightly provincial clone high street, but once you get even a little off that, you get theatres and libraries and cheap but not nasty pubs around greens where the kids disporting themselves are all sufficiently middle-class not to be threatening, only endearingly Skins-esque, and where bluff old gents stomp past with their beards, pipes and fisherman's caps, looking for all the world like they could have helped Jerome K Jerome out of a spot of comic difficulty that very afternoon. Not perhaps the first place one would expect to find Philip Jeays playing, but if he hadn't been I wouldn't have been there, so can't complain, eh?

Am still attempting to process Mervyn Peake's Mr Pye. It's no kin to Gormenghast, that's for sure; it lacks the Dickensian squalor, the dustiness, the constriction. Nor does it seem to me a simple 'christian allegory', one popular assessment; I suppose for a time it is, but apart from anything else every 40 pages or so it seems to become a totally different story, and all this without leaving the strange, tiny and very real island of Sark. At one point it seemed to me like Iris Murdoch attempting to complete a book from an outline left by PG Wodehouse; later like one of the South American magic realists had taken a holiday to the Channel Islands. Strangest of all, for all its marriage of lightheartedness to the deep power of faith, not once did it remind me of GK Chesterton. Perhaps I should simply accept it as a good read from the days before the genre walls went up.

Taped Channel 4's Life After People on Monday, but that review was enough to convince me that I don't need to watch it. I'm reading The World Without Us at the moment, and as much as I find the idea of the post-human world both fascinating and soothing, I'm not sufficiently obsessed with it to watch one of those bad CGI pseudo-documentaries about it. Maybe the one being adapted from the book will be sufficiently well-done for me to make an exception. It's not like films can never manage the same elegiac sense of our exit; Children of Men did a pretty good job of it. Of course, on some level I'm not daydreaming about the world without all humans, so much as the world without all the ones who are just cluttering the place up; ideally there should still be enough unspecified tech and supplies for me and mine to be comfortable in between wandering around appreciating the quiet decay. In the meantime, even an empty street can have something of the same piquancy - witness Woodrow Phoenix's Rumble Strip*, a haunting, damning commentary on car culture in which the art consists entirely of pictures of empty roads and carparks, street furniture, lane markings - for these streets no longer welcome people, and like most monsters the automobiles work better as unseen menaces. Even out among the bustle, it sounds as though ghost bikes have something of the same eloquence of absence.

*For the record, another fine 'graphic novel' which is clearly not a novel.

Some time since I've said what I've been up to, isn't it? In brief: Fitzrovia pub full of indie celebs, partying on the roofs of Holloway, much pizza, and an unexpectedly good Tuesday night on which more anon. But I shall pause to note that until further notice, the decor, the food and the (free, quality) jukebox have conferred upon The Mucky Pup the status of New Favourite Pub. Although fair enough, I imagine the company helped.

Two fascinating, flawed creators are breaking their silences this year. Neal Stephenson has a new book coming in September; having taken a well-deserved rest since finishing his magnificent Baroque Cycle he looks to be returning to SF, although the cover looks rather coy about implying anything of the sort. Meanwhile, there's Dave Sim's Glamourpuss. If you don't know about Dave Sim, I'm not sure I can summarise him for you; let's just say that as a comics writer and artist he's first rate, and as a letterer he's simply the best, but over the course of 26 years devoted wholly to his self-published magnum opus Cerebus, he understandably went a bit strange. In some ways, though, it's better not to know that, and just to read Glamourpuss, a remarkably sui generis comic* which combines fashion mag satire, art criticism, and Sim's commentary on his own progress as attempts to emulate the photorealist style of old comics artists he admires. I have no idea who he thinks is going to read this, and I find it glorious that he doesn't care. It's not something which would normally interest me, even, but he's good enough that it does.

I have no interest in seeing the film 21, but I've become somewhat obsessed with the soundtrack. Well, let's be more specific. The sleeve of my copy says only that it begins with the Rolling Stones' 'You Can't Always Get What You Want', failing to alert me that it is in face a desecration of as they are currently known a 'remix', one which I have since learned is by the ever-execrable Soulwax, our era's enthusiasm for whom will one day be considered in the same damning light as Jive Bunny's record sales. Nor have I ever got past The Aliens' contribution, which is exactly the sort of pleasant psychedelia one expects from them. But in between...well, you've got Peter, Bjorn & John's 'Young Folks', and that's always good to hear when the sun is shining. A couple of pleasantly unnerving pop-dance tracks. A fairly strong new effort by LCD Soundsystem - nothing on the level of 'All My Friends', but given how much of Sound of Silver sounded like a band suffering from that song's complaints rather than making them, welcome nonetheless. And more than any of these, MGMT's 'Time To Pretend'. This is exactly the kind of smug, hipster pop I normally loathe, or at most tolerate as background music, but here the serene arrogance wins me over just like it's meant to. "I'm feeling rough, I'm feeling raw, I'm in the prime of my life. Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives"...and I just think, yeah, sounds like a plan. I don't even mind that it's a clean radio edit.

*Like Alice in Sunderland or Black Dossier, Glamourpuss is another nail in the coffin of that absurd combination of marketing speak and cultural cringe that is the term 'graphic novel'. Whatever these are, and whatever they are is great art, they are sure as all the Hells not novels.

So I return from the countryside with its pigs and obelisks only to discover that London's been smelling like the countryside anyway. And fresh from storming the pub quiz at the seafront Hook & Parrot, whose new landlord is causing some controvery by bringing poledancers to sleepy Seaton, I head to a rather jolly harbour bar-themed evening in Whitechapel. There's a reminder there about the superfluousness of travel, isn't there? Anyway, Shore Leave - a night I would unhesitatingly recommend except that the next one is yet another First Saturday Of The Month job. Why is everything on that night these days? Still - cheap, friendly, good outfits, great music (too few clubs play Dietrich) and a very big garden for the smokers, complete with a mirrored car.
Among the country things with which London has yet to supply me: more opportunities to chop wood. Which is top fun - it's like exercise, except not boring, because there's an axe.

It was mainly the Nick Cave/Warren Ellis score which led me to take an interest in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, especially since I'm not that big on Westerns. Nonetheless, it is a very, very good film - although also one I'm glad I saw on a big screen, if not *the* big screen, because a lot of its power is in the slow, beautiful shots, the landscape. It never quite explains itself, even while the occasional voiceover makes it feel at times like an unusually well-done reconstruction for a documentary; you're left with echoes and intimations. There are hints of Judas in Ford's betrayal, the role which is necessary to the myth but also doomed to eternal vilification. Or is he the thwarted fan? Maybe it's about wanting to be someone, or failing that, to end them? These were my guesses, but I'm sure someone else could watch it and come up with another handful of motives just as plausible. And that's what I liked; it felt like life. Life in all its grandeur and mystery, as against the even-duller-than-the-real-thing school of 'realism;.
A masterstroke, too, to have Brad Pitt as the only real star. Not that the rest of the cast aren't fine actors, but they're not celebrities. Sometimes, an actor's fame as themselves can militate against their plausibility in a part; here it's an easy, effective way to get across Jesse's mythic status.

I find middling Who episodes like 'Planet of the Ood' or 'The Lazarus Experiment' strangely reassuring. In between the masterpieces and the atrocities, they're the ones which remind me most of the old series, which give me the strongest feeling of continuity.

Just returned from the Bankside 12th Night celebrations - unfortunate that the thing which best gets me in the relevant festive mood is the one marking season's end. It's vastly more popular than last time I went (I think I missed last year), but I still managed half-decent views of the Green Man's arrival and the wassailing, and was in a pretty good position for the mummers' play. There's a nagging sense in my mind of a half-formed connection between this and Popular last night - the Number One single as a British folk tradition, perhaps? - but I don't want to force it. Suffice to say, both were great fun. Highlight of Popular: 'Welcome To The Black Parade' into 'Boom! Shake The Room' (it may have a 100% strict concept, 'God Save The Queen' controversy aside, but how many nights can honestly equal that variety?). Highlight of 12th Night: the blithering arses next to me as the Green Man sails in justify their yapping by noting what I would otherwise have missed - there's a fragment of rainbow in the sky above us, and it's on a curved cloud. In other words - the sky smiled.
Post-mumming, took a look at the Tate's crack. I've seen better. Still, rather that than Catherine Tate's crack.

Don't know why I never got round to seeing Die Hard With A Vengeance sooner, given I love the first two, but the delay has made parts of it queasily prescient. Shots of the twin towers looming as New York is attacked I could have expected, but the real shocker...you know the plan Jeremy Irons and his accents are supposed to be undertaking, to beggar the USA? Dubya's pretty much managed that, hasn't he? And done it all while speaking in almost as silly a voice. Still, with Barack Obama's campaign regaining momentum, for now there's still hope. And in the Andes, two of the USA's hyper-rich are helping to fund an eye on the sky which will not only increase the sum (and accessibility) of human knowledge, but could well save us all from apocalyptic meteor impact. Isn't it odd how the merely super-rich seem content with vulgarity like diamond-studded mobiles and £35,000 cocktails, but the hyper-rich seem to rediscover altruism and vision? See also Warren Buffett.

A pretty quiet week for comics, but there were excellent new issues of Buffy (the first slow, character-centred episode of Whedon's Season Eight, but worth the wait) and Moon Knight. I still don't know what part of writing Entourage has equipped Mark Benson with a knack for brutal vigilante thrillers, but between his Punisher annual and this, I'm impressed. Just a shame about the art. Otherwise, it's Warren Ellis' week; Ultimate Human may not be the obvious title for a series marketing would probably rather have had as Ultimate Hulk Vs Iron Man, but fits the story Ellis has started telling, one of the happier vehicles for his recurrent fascination with the nature of posthumanity. Thunderbolts, on the other hand, is leaving the smart politics aside for the moment and concentrating on insanity, treachery and Venom eating people. Which also works.

Still reeling from John Crowley's 'Great Work of Time'* when I headed out yesterday, not quite into the past but into a nineties night. Some quibbles over what counted as Britpop, but Hell, they made better My Life Story selections than My Life Story did on Thursday. And Spearmint! Younger Younger 28s! The really rubbish stuff like OCS for which I fled the stage but it wouldn't have been the same without it! I do hope they have another one soon, I like pretending I'm still young.
(Though I'm convinced my Geneva t-shirt slowed down my service in the pubs beforehand, presumably because I looked like a tourist or a footballist rather than because London's barstaff are all still bitter about the second album)

Weird watching Near Dark again post-Heroes, seeing Nathan Petrelli as a hot young cowboy. Or after Big Love, given I now think of Bill Paxton as Mormon paterfamilias rather than a punky vampire. Lance Henriksen, though - well, I don't think I've seen him in any new roles since I first saw this, and I think he came out of the womb looking like that. It does remind me that at some point I should watch more Millennium, though - another good show screwed over by UK schedulers, just as I note Entourage, having been pushed back and back in the schedules lately and losing its repeat, is now disappearing mid-season (over christmas? We don't know, the continuity announcer was waffling on about unconnected programmes rather than telling us when this one would be back) lest it show up the rest of ITV's output as the dross it is.
But yes, Near Dark. Stands up very well, on the whole, aside from the sappy undercurrent of the family plot. And I don't think I noticed the first time I saw it that it doesn't once use the V-word.

Another V-word: Vegemite. I may have mentioned before how the health food shop where I normally get it is hopeless, only ever getting two pots at a time and almost always selling out before resupply, when it's not as if this is a perishable item. Well, Tesco now has whole trays of the stuff, and for about half the price, while also being much more convenient for me. Note to small local shops: the reason supermarkets are massacring you is that they don't suck.
(Similarly, even though I prefer to do my christmas shopping in the flesh - in the (apparently forlorn) hope that it might get me into the festive spirit - when I'm looking for a pretty recent, pretty big SF book, and one big central London bookshop doesn't have it at all, and another only has a slightly knackered copy, and I'm being sent vouchers to discount it online where it is already cheaper than in the physical shops, well then yes, I'm going to buy it online, aren't I?)

*"I have seen the real world gradually replaced by this other, nightmare world, which everyone else assumes is real"? I can sympathise with that. I wasn't going to buy a paper yesterday - I didn't need the TV listings, I've got a Radio Times. Should have stuck to the plan.
ETA: and with that thought fresh in mind, what should I find but a plug for a pseudoscientific modern restatement of 'everything for the best in this best of all possible worlds'. Note to self: never underestimate the human desire for consoling lies, even ones that absurd.

Have finally seen the film Nick Cave scripted, The Proposition. As I had been led to expect, Australia's wilderness had been filmed impeccably, forming a perfect setting for a typically Biblical Cave story (as in one of the bits of the Bible whose story is primal and powerful more than it conveys anything which even the loopiest fundamentalist could take as a moral lession). However, like every film I have ever seen to feature Ray Winstone, it would be significantly improved by the removal of Ray Winstone.
Some other actors who would have given a better performance as Captain Stanley:
Lance Henriksen
Michael Chiklis
Pierce Brosnan
Jack Davenport*
Nick Cave himself
Edward James Olmos
Michael Caine
Damn near anyone except Ray cocking Winstone.
Which makes it rather a shame that the one piece of casting already done for the next Hillcoat/Cave film, Death of a Ladies' Man, is...Ray sodding Winstone.

Taking the evidence of the new Mitchell & Webb radio sitcom pilot, 'Daydream Believers', in conjunction with the patchy current series of Peep Show, they've finally stretched themselves too thin. I suppose most everyone does in the end.
(Speaking of Peep Show - that ad shown during Friday's episode, in which a fairly attractive girl is in the bar with her own drunker self, and the tagline "Make sure you like what you see"? It's intended as an alcohol awareness thing, but I kept expecting it to turn into a variant on the Buffy episode where Evil Willow's after the normal, not-yet-gay one)

In one of yesterday's bowling matches I was, in third place, the highest-ranking male. Which I'm sure must say something vital and current about the obsolescence of gender stereotypes, though its wider applicability is perhaps doubtful.

*This option also playing up the Pirates of the Caribbean resonance the story already possesses.

Blades of Glory is a Will Ferrell comedy, so it should go without saying that it's vastly better than most films out there. And yet...it's not quite right. The dynamic is out somehow, though I couldn't tell you just how. At one point around the middle, I even started to think it was sagging. Perhaps I'm just in a hypercritical mood when it comes to comedy this weekend, because I also found one strand of last night's Peep Show plot unusually implausible.
Blades was, however, preceded by the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Though I enjoyed Dead Man's Chest more than a lot of people seemed to, for some reason the imminent arrival of the conclusion hadn't intruded too far on my consciousness. It would be fair to say that the trailer has changed that; it looks like they've given the story exactly the finale it needed, and now I can't wait.

Though not battling a plan to meet in a Leicester Square pub called Waxy O'Connor's on a Friday night, you can guess even from that bare description why I didn't have high hopes for the venue. But the drinks were only averagely ridiculous in price, the crowding less than one might easily expect, and the music an acceptable selection of the indie everyone likes, played at a volume sufficient to feel lively but easy to talk over. The crowd, though initially looking to be heavy on the townies, turned out to include representatives of most of London's tribes, apparently boozing in harmony, And the space itself - it feels like a sort of cavern network, and the room we were in had a tree towering over us, feeling like it might be holding up London. It reminded me of one of the better scenes in Stickleback, and that the West End is not quite a lost cause.

I've finished Burgo Partridge's endearingly batty History of Orgies. When I complain that non-fiction dates too easily, it's only really an objection to modern stuff - who wants to read a book prognosticating from the perspective of two years ago? It's pointless. But let them ferment a little longer and you get, as here, a perspective on the time of the writing as well as the times written about, fifties erudition woven in with the debaucheries of the ancients (and earlier moderns). Intriguingly, though a peripheral Bloomsburyite Burgo only appears to have a Wikipedia entry in Spanish. If you search him in English you get an article about his uncle and a list of dog breeds sandwiching the piece on group sex - which itself has "[citation needed]" after several statements of the blindingly obvious. It may be an incredibly handy resource, but it should never be forgotten that Wikipedia can also be extremely annoying.

I'm doing a bit of DJing early on at Feeling Gloomy later, but please don't let that dissuade you from coming down to check out the newer, shinier Luxembourg and all the other attractions.

Peep Show just gets more painful every time, doesn't it? Meanwhile, I only tried watching Roman's Empire because I used to vaguely know the lead back in the midlands; as such, I was a little jarred to find one scene filmed on my London road, out front of Rowan's. It's not a *bad* programme, but nor does it quite seem to gel, even with a good supporting cast including Nathan Barley and Roy from The IT Crowd.
One comedy which definitely doesn't live up to its early promise: Mike Judge's Office Space. After starting off with ten painfully accurate minutes which are almost too The Office to be fun, the real laughs ensue: our hero is left under hypnosis with no guilt or inhibitions, and stops giving even the semblance of a toss at work. Yes!, you think, This Is The Stuff! But then, like far too many US comedies, it starts pandering to conventional sentiments. Having established, very sensibly, that *all* work is rubbish, it pulls back, falters, flakes out. The scheme to rip off the employers (who sorely deserve it) falls apart for no particular reason. Our Hero's hypnosis starts wearing off, again for no particular reason. Convention is restored, normality asserted, the status quo survives. What looked so promising a denunciation of all work ends with a cliched paean to the dignity of manual labour. It's a terrible, middlebrow waste of what started so anarchically well. It's like when Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead veers away from the hijinks which should ensue and instead forces the oldest kid to get a job. Oh well, perhaps I was a fool ever to hope for greatness from any film where Jennifer Blandiston is the unattainable object of desire.

White Mischief last night had enough that was splendid to do great credit to a first attempt. Evil Genius were their usual charmingly demonic selves, and Flipron filled the bigger space as effortlessly as they do the smaller venues in which I've seen them before. True, Tuesday Weld were rather let down by Stephen's voice and poise not being up to the usual standards (he may just have been ill), and I'm afraid Kunta Kinte are no Catch - the Laurel Collective do this sort of thing much better (though Toby still only looks about 16, so it's not as if he's got no time to pull it all back together). The vast majority of the crowd had made an impressive effort, and the space was almost right, but I fear Conway Hall just doesn't have the edge of darkness which would suit a night like this - nor does it help having a Polonius quote over the stage (silly humanists). The most astounding entertainment I've seen in quite some time, though, was The Great Voltini. Several wise men and women of this parish having concluded, some time ago, that the mark of a great pop video was fire and/or breasts - last night I saw a fire started with a breast. Is this where the young folk would say 'FTW'?

There was sufficient rain in the world and sufficient tiredness upon me that I very nearly didn't go see Jason Webley after all - but I realised such behaviour really wasn't worthy of me, and persevered. Although I find the name Favela Chic repugnant, exactly the sort of thing Mugatu's Derelicte mocked so well, and in spite of the bar prices, I have to admit that it's rather a charming venue - like Stranger Than Paradise's previous venue, South London Pacific it's actually an interestingly-designed bar with a good ambience, as against the many London establishments which desperately wish to think of themselves thusly but are in fact an embarrassment to all concerned. Webley played a similar set to last time, but that's no bad thing when it includes songs like 'Dance While The Sky Crashes Down' (which gets a conga going over the tables), 'Drinking Song' and 'Eleven Saints', songs which can get even newcomers involved in a singalong without ever sacrificing artistry or submerging the performer in the crowd. Not that he'd be an easy man to submerge; he's Jesus starring in a Tom Waits biopic. He's also playing again on Wednesday, at Camden's Green Note, though I fear I am unlikely to be there this time.
(Classic Shoreditch sighting on the way there; a man whose white jacket was covered in slogans including "Love Is Never Right Wing", and a diamante CND symbol. Suddenly, conscription seems so appealing)

From its framing scene's distinctly family-friendly Romantics - Byron apparently played by David Walliams, and Mary Shelley most ladylike and proper - it is clear that alleged classic Bride of Frankenstein is actually a disastrous mess. Like Frankenstein it suffers from the impossibility of a first viewing, having been referenced and pastiched so often in the intervening years; unlike its predecessor, it also sucks. Frankenstein and his monster are both brought back from the dead in a manner which outraged even this hardened comics-reader, the tone is all over the place, the plot's confused beyond all hope, and even Dr Pretorius (the EVEN MADDER scientist who eggs Frankenstein on, and who has such promising material as the 'gods and monsters' speech) is played so effetely as to undermine the character's potential. There is precisely one good thing about this film - the Bride herself, who still seems truly unearthly, uncanny in a way so little horror (and none of the rest of this drivel) ever manages. The downside being, she's on screen for maybe five minutes tops. The film about this film is vastly superior, and you don't need to have seen this to appreciate it.