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.

( A Day And A Night And A Day by Glen Duncan )
Since which I decided, after a few Conan stories which were dubiously racist and rapey even by Robert E Howard's standards ("Women are cheap as plantains in this land, and their willingness or unwillingness matters as little" - this is the hero speaking, remember - "But I am not such a dog as to leave a white woman in the clutches of a black man."), to read some nice light space opera. Except it turns out that like the Glen Duncan book, James Blish's 1956 They Shall Have Stars is about the spiritual malaise of humanity in the first decades of the 21st century. The USA's democratic traditions are wounded after certain elements of the administration decided, for reasons of "security", to place themselves above the law. A key government position became hereditary, building on trends initiated when "a stunningly popular Man-on-Horseback who dripped charisma but had no brains to speak of" was President. Space exploration has stalled, tangled in bureaucracy and vested interests*; "scientific ideas have become so abstract that even their originators can't suggest ways to test them", except by ever more grotesquely massive and experimental means (although at least unlike CERN, theirs seem to work). It's not so much a space opera as a prologue to a space opera in the other books - for one junior senator, against all odds, finds himself in a position to turn things around...and no mention is made of his race, but Bliss Wagoner is at least as silly a name as Barack Obama, right?

*As with Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, this dystopian vision of pretty much now is slightly too optimistic, in that apparently no major moves were made in space since the 1981 establishment of a base on Titan. We should be so lucky as to live in that dystopia.

I'm surprised more hasn't been made of Mick Harvey leaving the Bad Seeds. Mick's been working with Nick since The Boys Next Door, and I've always wondered how much of what we think of as Cave is in fact Harvey, particularly when listening to Harvey's other projects. I suppose now we get to find out.

Final Crisis: Superman Beyond's second issue confirms that this is the comic Final Crisis should have been. Yes, Grant Morrison is reusing his old tropes again - breaking the fourth wall, Limbo, the self-evolving hyperstory, creators trapped in creation - but here there's a manic, fizzing joy and ingenuity I'm not getting from the parent Rock of Ages reprise. Some great 3D sequences, too - though should you happen, as I did, to look out of the window with your glasses still on, it brings a real moment of Crisis terror - RED SKIES!
Elsewhere in comics, Bendis' Dark Avengers may not have any lines to equal the best of Warren Ellis' Thunderbolts run, but in so far as it's taking that series' concept - Marvel's biggest bastards given the keys to the kingdom - to the next level, I'm very much interested. Thunderbolts, meanwhile, has gone deeper and darker under Andy Diggle, and this issue includes a considerably more substantial Barack Obama appearance than that meaningless fluff-piece of a Spider-Man back-up strip, albeit to considerably less fanfare.

Have been left with a nagging sensation that I've not used my leisure to best advantage this week, to the extent that I started getting quite angry with myself/the world and had to go wander the British Museum for a while to calm down. Silly, really - even aside from the nebulous business of Seeing Nice People, I've watched another Losey/Pinter/Bogarde masterpiece, Accident; seen the Soft Close-Ups and Mr Solo; and made a reasonably good start on Ulysses, so it's not as if I'm flicking myself off to Trisha just yet.

I know list articles are intrinsically pointless, and I know they're designed to provoke quibbling, so I'm not going to get up in arms about the omissions from the Guardian's Novels You Must Read, or the times where they've chosen a book which isn't the author's best. And I should be glad, I suppose, that one of the seven sections was science fiction and fantasy. But since when was Kavalier & Clay, The Man Who Was Thursday or The Wasp Factory science fiction or fantasy? They may not be dull enough to be literary fiction, but none of them takes place in a world that is not the consensus version of this one - except in so far as they are not true. If we say that the fictional comics in Chabon's book make it an alternate world, then so does the fictional MP in The Line of Beauty, and down that line every book bar the most tiresomely domestic becomes SF. Which would amuse me at least a little, it's true, but is patently nonsense.

The headlines of late may be a seemingly endless parade of semi-comprehensible financial doom, so I've been very glad of the Somali pirate debacle. Yes, I know that real modern pirates are not nice men (for that matter, nor were the old school, whatever the twinkle in Errol Flynn or Johnny Depp's eye might try to tell you otherwise). But it's still hard not to love a story in which pirates nick 33 tanks, and then manage to shoot three of their own number during a debate over tactics.
"He said radicals on board wanted to keep the shipment of 33 T-72 tanks and other weapons in Somalia while the moderates wanted "to back-pedal on the ransom issue"."
Moderate pirates!

Marie Antoinette is a spectacularly boring film. And I use those words precisely - it is at once spectacular, and boring. I've watched both of Sofia Coppola's previous films in a sort of doze, but this time I was watching with friends so that wouldn't fly. Nonetheless I was lulled into enough of a dream state that, as when you're in a cruise ship which is also your school, the distinction between Kirsten Dunst and Scarlett Johansson ceased to have any meaning to me and I started talking about the former's album of Tom Waits covers. The sets, the costumes are so lavish, made and dressed and shot with such obvious love...and yet the film conspires to make you stop looking at them, or at least half-close your eyes, with its majestic tedium.
The new series of The Sarah Jane Adventures, on the other hand, was clearly made for about thruppence and yet it's full of thrills. And that's not even as strained a link as you might think, because the astronomer in the first two episodes has previously played Robespierre opposite Richard E Grant's Scarlet Pimpernel, so there. But really, this was cheap; there's some model work with the radio telescope which would have been at home on Thunderbirds, and yet it's still a better Sontaran story than the last series of Doctor Who managed. The only problem being - they do rather let this show sneak out, don't they? I know it's on in the teatime slot for children, but they must know that a fair amount of adult Doctor Who fans want to watch it, so why is it not brought to our attention a little more?

Am increasingly losing patience with the mice. Given I have now learned that 'put a donk on it' is a viable solution to all problems, I am wondering how best to put a donk on a mouse, and even (though I hesitate to ask) how exactly that would help.

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.

Just as the Large Hadron Collider seems to have left us in the same lousy universe we were in on Tuesday, so its associated Torchwood episode was a bit of a disappointment. Part of the problem is that what counts as mad science for us should be positively passe on Earth-Who - "Large Hadron Colliders? Oh yeah, UNIT has two. At Torchwood we only have one, but it's better. Pink. Of course, the Doctor didn't need one at all, he trained Higg's bosons to come when he played the recorder." It's the same mismatch we got in Marvel's various foolhardy attempts to have the events of seven years ago be a big deal on their Earth, even though that New York gets its skyscrapers trashed pretty much weekly. But even beyond that, ( spoilers ) You'd do better having Keith Richards warn against the evils of drugs.

There's been a lot of going back this week. I don't mean in the wider world - that seems Hellbent on beating a course back to the Dark Ages, to the extent that I can't be bothered to keep charting it on here, it depresses me to no end. I mean personally, whether it be the old gang back together at the wedding, or my plans for tonight when I'm off to the Verge (as was), scene of many a drunken night back in the Fan Club days, to see the New Royal Family, sober. Last Saturday I went to Stay Beautiful for the first time this year, an experience I half-expected to be valedictory, but which left me feeling much less out of place than I expected. And last night, even with Indelicates and David Devant shows on offer, I went to see the Blow Monkeys. Now in a sense, Devant or the Indelicates would have been more 'going back' - I've seen each I don't know how many times, and the Blow Monkeys never. Nor, in my decade or so of London gigging, have I previously been to the Jazz Cafe*. But the Blow Monkeys...I was introduced to them getting on for 15 years ago, just as my music tastes were starting to get beyond what the inkies and Select (RIP) were feeding me. Their infectious sense of calm and beauty, the genuine venom mixed in with an understanding that you can sometimes revolt better by transcendence than opposition - that wasn't very teenage, and in some ways it's still not very me, but it became quite formative nonetheless. I'd heard Dr Robert had moved on in something of the same wrong direction his contemporary Paul Weller did, and never expected a new Blow Monkeys album, or a chance to see them live. But then, that was before eternal recurrence came early and everyone started reforming.
Now, obviously I know that for the time being, time impacts on beings. But I've seen eighties acts before; Hell, I've seen seventies acts before. And most of them seemed to have jumped on to that celebrity track where ageing really does make people look cooler somehow, more lived-in and not just lived-out. Which is why it still came as a surprise when the chap in the audience I'd unconsciously pegged as 'the big lad who needs to stop trying to carry off the Dr Robert look these days' was, inevitably, Dr Robert. Dr Robert who was one of the reasons I initially got into the band because a few people had mentioned that I looked like him - and not putting myself or my younger self down here, but he looked like a much prettier me, which obviously had this narcissist hooked. Still charming, still sparkling, still with that voice and even that lisp - but not the young Apollo anymore.
And there weren't that many people there. First London date in 18 years, people know at least a couple of songs, not that big a venue - it should be fairly full, if not perhaps sold out. Not so. And predictably, some of that crowd are lig zombies who chatter through the new stuff - of which we get a lot but hey, I like most of the new album, I'm not complaining. What does puzzle me is the selection from the classics. Obviously they wouldn't get away without 'Digging Your Scene' or 'It Doesn't Have To Be This Way', and they don't try, or seem anything less than happy to be playing them again and comfortable with their past. But then we get songs that hit as duets, sung solo - 'Celebrate', 'Wait' and 'Slaves No More', the last of which I didn't even like much in the first place. Likewise 'Heaven Is A Place I'm Moving To' and 'Springtime for the World', songs I usually skip on CD. I wasn't honestly expecting 'Beautiful Child' in the current climate, or 'Cash' which I imagine would be a nightmare to play live, but wasn't 'This Is Your Life' a hit? Wasn't 'It Pays To Belong'?
I'm not saying I regret going, but I still feel like I missed something.

The support, incidentally, was Rhoda Dakar, ex of the Specials, accompanied by some bloke from Bad Manners on acoustic guitar. She played 'Racist Friend' from the old days, but not 'The Boiler'. Now, if you've never heard 'The Boiler'...it's getting on for 30 years old now and I'd say there's still nothing quite so harrowing ever to have been released in the disguise of a pop single. It wouldn't work in a cheery support slot for an upbeat band, it wouldn't work acoustic, and although she's aged incredibly well, one could hardly shout for it without the risk of being terribly misconstrued. But still, it seems weird to have seen Rhoda Dakar and not heard 'The Boiler'.

*Not what the name implies, is the short version. More a mid-size provincial venue, or the 12 Bar inexplicably rebuilt at double size. And £4.10 a pint? Get out.

...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)

Granted, the last few times we were in the Noble we moaned, only partly in jest, that there were people drinking there, sitting in our seats, and generally lowering the tone. But if nothing else, shouldn't they have secured its future, meant it wouldn't have to be up for sale again, leave it in a position where one person's illness doesn't force us to resort to a nearby 'pub' no longer even fit to be named in this journal lest by doing so I pollute the servers and screens?
That's the thing about dark times - they're dark on every level. You can do your best to ignore the geopolitics, and heavens know it's tempting, but then you find your local's deserted you, your supermarket's discontinued your favourites, your shoelaces just won't stay tied. Once the entropy takes hold, it's as above, so below.
And then, of course, there's a reversal of fortunes in the war in heaven. And suddenly you see a pug acting the fool and a terrier with the yawns, and the moon's impossibly big and watching over Stoke Newington, and the setting sun lights the clouds behind the Gothic revival water tower like Camelot never fell.

I've finally finished a manga! Libraries have a nasty habit of getting enough volumes to hook me, and then never buying the rest - or in the case of Koike & Kojima books going one worse and, as sadistic as the stories, getting in the first couple - and then a random smattering of later volumes, just to tempt me. But well done Westminster, for completing their Death Note collection, even getting in the fairly superfluous companion and offcuts collection How to Read. Even leaving that aside, I can't deny there's some fat could be trimmed from the 12 volumes of the story proper, and that it never entirely gets to grip with the questions its central premise raises (vigilante killings of criminals by means of a magic notebook - I'm in favour, myself, but there's an emotional weight to the question which never quite makes the page). It does, however, manage some real moments of shock as it twists and turns, and one of those curious little tropes I always love is the ridiculously convoluted fight scene between incredibly smart antagonists, each of them revealing that they've anticipated the other's anticipation of their anticipation of...and so on. Consider the Seventh Doctor at his most Machiavellian, or Vandal Savage versus Resurrection Man in DC One Million, or Iron Man versus Black Panther in Enemy of the State II. Consider even, as comic incarnation of the type, the time-travelling fight scene in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey - Death Note is fit to stand among them.

Meanwhile in Western comics vigilante news, Garth Ennis' epic Punisher run has concluded. Now there's a comic prepared to address its moral issues, albeit one which never collapses into the pathetic hand-wringing which has often haunted the series when other writers were doing it wrong. The problem was that the Punisher - who is sensible, and shoots criminals in the head - was co-existing with allegedly more admirable heroes who beat criminals up, and then leave them alive to escape from gaol and kill again once another writer wants to use the same villain. By shifting him ever so slightly out of that context, Ennis could cut loose - without going too far the other way and turning it into a puerile celebration of violence for violence's sake. There's a very good scene in Warren Ellis' new issue of Astonishing X-Men in which Cyclops takes a similar clear-sighted line on how, in the superhero's line of work, sometimes killing is the only sensible thing to do. Contrast this with this week's editions of Secret Invasion and Captain Britain - they're both good comics, but in both heroes who normally make a big deal of the Heroic Code and how they Never Kill show no compunction whatsoever about killing invading Skrulls. So implicitly, even the life of an intractably evil human is sacrosanct, but those green alien mofos? Waste 'em. Leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, doesn't it?
Startlingly, DC also managed to put out a good comic this week - Grant Morrison's latest Batman RIP reassures me that, the evidence of Final Crisis aside, he hasn't been totally subsumed by Levitzseid's Anti-Fun Equation just yet.

You know when you feel like you somehow missed the weekend? Last weekend, I didn't get that. Between Batman and barbecue and British Bulldog, not to mention trees and croquet and dark secrets and lashings of ginger beer, I came as near as I've managed in a while to living without dead time. If I have a regret, it's not the demise of a long-serving shirt (it met as fine an end as any of us can hope for, and I've always been a great believer in the noble art of dying well) - it's just that I forgot to listen to 'The First Big Weekend of the Summer'.

I was introduced to the myth of John Kennedy Toole years back; though he wrote the scabrous, satirical romp of a very nearly Great American Novel that is A Confederacy of Dunces, he never lived to see it published - his suicide at least implicitly blamed on the publishers' rejection. What the myth never mentioned was that he'd written another book, The Neon Bible - and somehow when the Arcade Fire borrowed that name for their second album, I never learned the source. So when I saw a book by him, with that name, in a charity shop - well, no deliberation was needed.
I recently read The Neon Bible, and I now know why the myth omits it; it's bobbins. Forgivable bobbins - it's juvenilia, after all - but bobbins nonetheless. As a tale of hick life, it's pretty much a PG-rated And The Ass Saw The Angel, which is not what the world needs, is it now?

I've now moved on to something far more powerful - Greg Bear's latest, City at the End of Time. The jacket quotes big up his hard SF credentials, but the debts to Arthur C Clarke and Olaf Stapledon which that and the title imply - and make no mistake, they are massive - are easily equalled by the echoes of Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and Harrison's Viriconium. The grandfathers of slipstream, in other words - and not just in terms of the tone with which Bear describes that majestic, crumbling city in which the last humans live out their long, forgetful lives. For some of those last humans dream of a time long past, and in a Seattle which may or may not be our world's, three modern people dream of the future...
Which is not a technique I'd normally like, because it smacks too much of a targetted reader-identification character, and I almost always hate them - modern humans lower the tone. But whether or not Bear was nudged in this direction, he can carry it off, capturing that sense of entropy, captivity and impending doom so often remarked upon these days, offering an explanation for it. One which ties in everything from the Indonesian 'garden of Eden' to all those typos in books these days - and there was me thinking it was just laziness, illiteracy and cheapskate publishers.
(Though in City at the End of Time, I should note, I have yet to spot a single error bar one of those maddening American references to a paper apparently called the London Times. It is perversely, brilliantly well-edited for a product of this entropic age)

Doomsday is a very odd film. Neil "Dog Soldiers" Marshall clearly wanted to pay homage to some of his favourite films - Escape from New York, Mad Max, maybe even traces of Excalibur and Lord of the Rings. So he strung together a load of scenes which would fit in those films, and then decided to worry about it making sense later. And then forgot that bit. It's entertaining enough to watch once, with drinks, in company. And it at least explains how Rhona Mitra's so unflappable in Boston Legal - once you've fought feral cannibals and armoured executioners, even James Spader doesn't seem that scary. I'm a little puzzled as to why it needed to be set in the future, though - it portrays a horrifically overcrowded London where the public transport is at a standstill, and Glasgow reduced to a state of barbarian savagery, but that only needed the datestamp 'Saturday night'.

Finally saw Daniel Kitson last night, after having been raved at about him by at least three mostly separate sets of comedy chums for, what, a couple of years now? It was a self-confessedly shambolic preview of his new show, 66a Church Road, and one which will probably bear scant resemblance to the finished product, but yes, he is very funny. I am, however, more mystified than ever as to how come so many girls I know have crushes on the guy.
I went to see him at Battersea Arts Centre, of which I've similarly been long aware - but that utilitarian name never filled me with enthusiasm. I hadn't expected something so grand, murals of burning skies behind a grand staircase down which people sweep to the strains of Mono because someone who works there knows exactly what incidental music sets their space off to its best advantage. I'm now kicking myself that I never went to see The Masque of the Red Death while it was there - but that's London for you, isn't it? The man who is tired of London is tired of life, but look at that the other way round and it's a reminder that in London, you always end up missing out on something.

I know I'm not the first to say this, but who would ever have thought that a Doctor-free, Donna-heavy Doctor Who episode, and one flashing back to her debut in The Worst Who Story Ever at that, could be as good as 'Turn Left'? I still worry, though - the over-egged ending was its weakest moment, and while the Next Week trailer was arresting...well, on paper and even on clips, 'Doomsday' looked arresting, and look what a pig's ear that was.
I worry even more about the point that Lawrence Miles made - we watch this bleak vision of what would happen in a world without the Doctor, and we forget that there's another parallel without a Doctor, one all too close to home.

'Freebooter' and 'freelancer' are pretty much synonyms, aren't they? So why does 'freebooter' sound so much more dashing when boots are, in and of themselves, far less exciting than lances?
(This thought occasioned by doing the Salisbury quiz for the third time, with the third totally different team. And less than spectacular results, but that's by the by)

I've liked most shows I've seen James Lance in, and ditto Nicolas "Nathan Barley" Burns. They've worked together before, to great effect, as support in the Stephen Fry PR-com Absolute Power. So surely I ought to be glad that they're reunited in a sitcom about a bar for off-duty superheroes, particularly given what a rich source of comedy such settings have proved in comics?
Well, I would be, but it's on ITV. And given the near-infallibility of ITV's reverse Midas touch lately, that pretty much guarantees that it will make My Hero look like JLI.

The last Torchwood: well, I suppose it had its moments. ( Spoilers ) And then after, the trailer for today's new Who. Speeches about what the Doctor is get me every time. Or at least, they used to, but while at least Tate wasn't screeching these lines, nor could she make me believe them. I'm still going to watch it, obviously. But without any hope of enjoying the experience.

I'm currently halfway through two novels which have a brilliant handle on the quiet desperation of life in the first decade of the 21st century. One of them, Friction, is by Joe Stretch, the young frontman of the quite good band (we are) Performance; it came out last month. The other is 40 years old - John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar.
Friction is Michel Houllebecq if he were twice as good, and minus the po-faced self-importance of the Gallic intellectual cliche. The anomie, the corrosive effect of glossy magazines, the deadening social assumptions are all laid bare with a merciless scalpel. And nimble phrasing, too - in discussion of the modern fondness for comedy, he describes the era as 'pissless'. Which took me a moment, but...wow. Or consider: "Nowadays, opting out of social occasions is a form of self-mutilation." Best summation I've yet seen of the tension felt when one opts for a QNI. Or consider: "We have arrived at some poorly signposted junction in Earth's existence, when people can do little bar pay their rent and sit at tables, order drinks and chew Italian bread to mush. Who is remembering all this?"
Brunner, on the other hand, predicted the barely-suppressed hysteria of the big picture. Like anyone who gazes into the future, he's a little off in places; he's managed to get RSS aggregation and fake interactivity down, for instance, without realising the computer and the TV would merge. But if you had shown him the modern world, he'd have taken maybe a day to grasp it, and there's few enough people who live here of whom that can be said. In places, the problem is simply that his dystopia is too optimistic - he assumed that somewhere past the six billionth Earth human, even the core of the Catholic church would accept the need for birth control, nevermind the US government - but the overall tone, the resource shortage, the slow collapse; he saw it all coming. The gang problem causing so much woe in London? He foresees and explains it almost in passing, showing how it's the natural consequence of putting territorial mammals in an overcrowded environment. A prophet who should have been heeded sooner.

I would not yet make any claims for Marvel Comics' Secret Invasion event as Art, but as a big superhero comic about stuff blowing up, it got off to a very good start. ( Moderate spoilers )

Another good Clockwork Comedy on Tuesday; Carey Marx and Parsnip the teddy have such a wonderful way with the Wrong. I also liked the drunk Jewish girl* and the low-key storytelling guy (though I felt so sorry for him when he thought that so many people were laughing that it must all be a dream), but the video shop chap - not so much. You can't do geek humour and get the details wrong. If you were that into 300, you wouldn't keep calling it The 300. If you want to be Batman, you'll know that (regrettably) he doesn't kill. And above all, if you read Doctor Who Magazine you'll know it's not been Weekly in years.
Besides, what kind of film buff prefers video to DVD? DVD is the ultimate geek medium.

Today's random historical peculiarity: Strasbourg's 1518 'Dancing Plague': "Hundreds of men and women danced wildly, day after day, in the punishing summer heat. They did not want to dance, but could not stop". Many died. Puts the panic about Killer Rave Drug Ecstasy into perspective, doesn't it?

*Yes, I know, quelle surprise.

Have just watched the first episode of the final season of The Wire. I know I should have held off, but I'm as weak as any of those Baltimore addicts left alone with some of what they crave. It's as magnificent and as true as ever, but the series' ongoing message - that nothing ever changes, that the system cannot be beaten - rings particularly true right after a bank holiday weekend, when for four somehow-never-quite-as-glorious-as-they-should-be days you could almost believe you were out of the game. And then you're pulled back into the machine.

Let's just take eight more posts like this as read, shall we?

That line was when I knew Mad Men had got me. Until then, its vision of the ad men of sixties Madison Avenue had all been very nicely done and well-acted and period authentic and ultimately, so what? I've got Ashes to Ashes, I don't need Life on Mars without the time travel. I need more than period recreation, and in that line I knew I could get it here. And to then follow it up with something even better, with "You're born alone and you die alone, this world just drops a lot of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts"...I am, appropriately, sold.

Went to Kilburn last night for The Low Edges' last hurrah. Another name to be added to the rollcall of my own hypothetical version of 'Sweeping the Nation', another great band who never quite made it to fame and fortune, or even the level of momentum which sustains a band in their absence. They will not be missed by enough of us, but they will be missed; all the more so for having lighting which suited them so well last night, and for ending the end with their finest song, 'Carfax'.

I was never much of a Dungeons & Dragons fan myself - like many another originator of a genre, it was a flawed and clunky beast soon overtaken by the others which sprung up in its wake - but Gary Gygax's death still hit me in the much the same way I imagine Stan Lee's will; a chancer, and a glory hound, and in many ways not that much cop, but without what he enabled the world would be an even worse place. Which reminds me, there are plenty of entertaining obituaries of the flamboyant publisher Anthony Blond online, but oddly (given how thorough they normally are about putting everything online), the Guardian's isn't among them. This annoys me, because while it isn't as good as the Telegraph's it ended with a variant of one of my favourite phrases - "he added greatly to the gaiety of nations". Which set me wondering, aside from a very few genuine heroes of history, can any of us hope for a better epitaph?

...though I did drink rather too much at the weekend, and I am emotionally devastated by the conclusion of The Wire season 4 which, like the book I'm reading about occupied France, seems rather too applicable to the wider world. I remain flabbergasted at the stupidity of offended people (you should all know the Brooker link by now): cf complaints about last week's Ashes to Ashes being inappropriate broadcasting in light of the Suffolkator's trial, even though the episode's substance was precisely the unfortunate prejudices which hamper investigation of crimes against prostitutes. See also: "protesters are claiming the pictures [of Mohammed on Wikipedia] have been posted simply to 'bait' and 'insult' Muslims", even though the pictures are by muslims, albeit rather more civilised ones from 700 years ago. Roll on the reformation, eh?

Oh, and comedy last night: vair good. Even worth changing trains at Paddington for, though next time I would strive to avoid that bit.

Those of you who've been paying attention may notice that my Current Music all December has been christmas music, and today it's not. Why so? Well, there's a lot of good christmas music one can't sensibly listen to during the rest of the year, but there are even fewer occasions when it makes so much sense to listen to songs about being five years from the end of the world. Which is not to say that I am definitely expecting the Eschaton - I've seen far too many supposed Last Days pass for that (though I do remember being terrified on my first one, back in the eighties. Stupidly, I don't remember the date, only the fear, and being pulled around in a sledge by my parents, which helped somewhat). It's more that I see the world filled with so many vectors towards a bad apocalypse (climate change, superbugs, fundamentalism, the list goes on) that if I want to feel any hope at all for the future, it seems worth half-believing that a good apocalypse might arrive first. I'm all too aware that we might all wake up on December 22nd 2012 having made no evolutionary leap to the hypercontext, no contact with benevolent aliens, no progress at all. But the chance that we might seems distinctly more plausible than the alternative. The effort and ingenuity of the small portion of humanity who understand how bad things are being sufficient to get us out of this hole? That's just crazy talk.

Maddening selection of good gigs on Wednesday, but I couldn't abandon the annual Jeays extravaganza. Not quite so crowded this year - I think maybe the advance sales backfired, with people who knew they wouldn't get seats deciding not to bother. But still excellent. Peacock still does one song I really like ("you change and adapt"), and the Speech Painter finally deployed some (not bad) new material even if I am now convinced he's Sylar (watchmaker by day + eyebrows). And Jeays was on fine form, complete with messiah complex, no navel and a really good corduroy frock coat-type-thing. Maybe it was a duster, I've never been entirely sure what dusters are. Our numbers came up, so that was 'Richenda' and 'Midnight In Trieste' guaranteed, and the rest of the crowd didn't choose anything too dreadful.

As against the genteel Jeays show, all civilised and seated, Patrick Wolf's crowd look like the cast of Skins let loose on a Manics fan's wardrobe (except that like so many real young people, most of them are not actually that attractive when you stop and look). This goes double for Wolf himself: in the flesh he looks about 12, and may I be permitted a rockist moment if I say that I found the raven he was wearing on his head for the early set somewhat distracting? He clearly doesn't have an insincere bone in his body, which is essential if you're going to go this OTT musically while dancing in the fake snow against a backdrop of giant snowflakes. He's a star like they used to make, except somehow more fragile. I think part of what makes me feel so old watching him is that at the back of my mind I can't help but worry about him, especially in light of his live problems earlier this year (no sign last night, thank heavens).

Oh yeah, and speaking of feeling old - my birthday's all been organised by Facebook and email this year, hasn't it? If I don't know you via those channels then you're probably a creepy stalker and not even a very good one - December 27th, The Noble, Crouch Hill, from 7pm.

Of possible interest to some of you: new Gang Of Four demos free online.

You wait ages for a Neil Gaiman film, and then two come across at once. Beowulf didn't have me blubbing sentimentally like Stardust did, but in its way it's sadder. And it doesn't have so many comedians in it, but it's just as funny, in its own bleak way. In tone, if not style, it betrays Gaiman's debt to James Branch Cabell - to Cabell's fascination with the flaws and the humanity and the lies behind any heroic myth, his fear that even when you accomplish your goals, "Nothing was as good as it should have been". But with Cabell, Gaiman recognises that mere slash-and-burn demythologisation is easy, and as false as the shiny, superficial account. "It is solely by believing himself but a little below the seraphim that man has become, on the whole, distinctly preferable to the chimpanzee", said Cabell (I may paraphrase slightly) - similarly, Gaiman knows that because a hero is a bullsh1tter, doesn't mean he's not also a hero. Granted, it is very hard to take this line without seeming by extension to justify every grubby lie and manipulation perpetrated in the name of leadership image and 'the greater good' - but intuitively, if not in a way I can quite verbalise, I know the difference, even if I can also see how people lose sight of it.
It is a very faithful adaptation, in its way - it assumes the poem to be a historical record, notes how historical records can distort the facts, and reads backwards. If you want that with more spoilers, try here; for particular clarity on Angelina Jolie's (excellent) take on Grendel's mother, there's a phrase here which I'd quote if it didn't give far too much away. Of course, I usually like Angelina, especially in femme fatale roles - the surprise was that I thought Ray Winstone perfectly cast. I've never thought that before, but never before has he played the last of the barbarian heroes, a man who knows he may have more in common with the monsters he slays than with those who come after him. It helps too that the motion-capture technology makes him considerably less offensive to the eye, yet at the same time plausible - which is odd given it makes the Queen look like she's made of putty.
(Coincidentally, my current bag book is the unfortunately-titled Black Man, which is also fascinated by the idea of the hyper-male warrior, who fights society's battles, but whom that society also regards as kin to monsters. I thought about trying to pull Grosse Point Blank in here too, because I saw that while Ill and it also concerns the melancholy of the killer's life, but for all that John Cusack is superhott in it, I don't think you could call him hyper-male)

Department Of Offended People Missing The Point: posters for the sly and satirical Shoot 'Em Up have been censured for glamorizing violence. Clearly these people haven't twigged that the poster of the prick from Sideways with a gun captioned "Just another family man making a living" is *meant* to offend - to point up the moral blindness of all those whose jobs make the world a worse place.
And when it comes to slapping down Ronan Bennett's "clumsy tirade" against Martin Amis, well, I think I shall just hand over to the ever-clearsighted Christopher Hitchens to enumerate Ronan the Accuser's muddles and slurs and sheer foolishness.

"If we want our kids and our friends' kids to have somewhere to live that's of a decent standard" then the answer has nothing to do with building more houses, on the green belt or otherwhere. It has to do with curbing the buy-to-let explosion. Apart from anything else, unless there's a change in the law and the tax breaks then all those new homes are just going to be bought up by investors like the extant ones are. So all you'll accomplish is destroying what little open space remains on this overbuilt island and making the rich richer. And meanwhile, a senior cop wants to ban having a drink in the park of a summer afternoon as a strike against teen disorder - having apparently failed to notice that there already exist laws against the disorderly acts themselves. So, given a certain element of society is breaking the current laws with no fear of the consequences, they'll do likewise with this one - while the people who aren't currently causing anyone a problem, in part because of an ingrained reluctance to break the law, will be denied yet another of life's simple pleasures. I mean, seriously, how can anyone fail to spot these jaw-crumblingly obvious correspondences? Are they all really that stupid?
...And this is why I've not been updating a great deal lately. When I'm reasonably content, I see no particular angle from which I could write much more than "I watched Bad Boys. Stuff blew up. It was fun" or "I went to the park and drank some pink wine. This made me happy". And when I'm not in a good mood...well, OK, sometimes it's in-between. Sometimes I have vague musings on a topic of possible interest. But then I check myself and ask, am I actually about to say anything new, or would it just be posting for the sake of posting? Sure, pretty much any half-formed thought which manages to survive its first five seconds in my brain will be of more intellectual merit than, oooh, 95% of the stuff posted to the Guardian blogs, but that is not in itself a sufficient qualification for existence. But beyond the musings comes the rage, and the internet is not exactly short of splenetic rants either, is it? If I were being paid to do a weekly column on What Really Grinds My Gears, sorted. Hell, I wouldn't find a daily one too taxing either. Or even hourly so long as I could file in advance...but I'm not. I'm on my own time. And the sheer amount of stuff that pisses me off is beginning to alarm me. I mean, yes, I know I've said in the past that I'm hoping to muster enough pure hate that I can channel it as beams of destructive energy, but when you think about it, running omega beams off an internal power source never did Darkseid much good, did it? And that line in BBC4's Cantor documentary where the shrink noted that schizophrenic breakdown was often preceded by "looking too hard at the world...a rigidity of perceptual stance" felt far too close to home. So I've once more become a little captivated by that Franz Ferdinand line from 'Matinee', where he's on about all the things he hates and "you smile, mention something that you'd like, how you'd have a happy life if you did the things you like". Lately there was this spider on the outside of my kitchen window and I thought, he's still, maybe if I just look at the web instead of the spider? It's a lovely pattern, a startling feat of construction, almost mandala-like. And it worked, for a little while. But then last night, I come in and he's moving - the way they move being what gets me with spiders, it's like the sound of metal on metal, goes right through me. But I try to calm it down, manage. Then back in again later - and now he's eating, giving me the full Shelob revulsion/terror/killer instinct reaction, and there are limits, and I have a decent sized book in my hand. If I am to be redeemed, it will not be by that road.

Against which...well, the My Life Story B-sides and rarities album finally arrived. As with Suede's Sci-Fi Lullabies, it is marred by being incomplete, and incomplete in odd ways - it includes plenty of the later ones nobody was much bothered about, utterly superfluous demos, and far too many takes on bloody 'Emerald Green', while omitting (among others) the marvellous 'Sir Richard Steele'. And even the good tracks...they never quite captured their magic on tape, did My Life Story. The CDs were always reminders of the live show, because live they were magic. Literally, and yes I do know what that word means - I saw them transform Derby's dingy square into a plaza on Roxyworld.
See? Even when I'm trying to be happy, it goes this way. For the moment, at least - over and out.

People who've yet to see The Wire - are you sick of those who have going on about it? The first episode is legitimately streaming here 'til the end of the week, so you can so easily find out what the fuss is about. Yes, it's about drug dealers, and the first one is free. Anyway, that'll give you some idea of quite why everyone gets so excited about the show, but I've just finished the third season, and dear heavens it gets even better - and, hard as it may be to believe, even more bleak. There are glimmers of light, hope and humanity, for sure - but overall, and especially coming straight from the Potter and Rome conclusions, I feel bloody desolate. If Jacqui Smith really wants new ideas on reducing the harm caused by drugs, she could really not do better than watching these first three series.

Staying with the theme of social collapse, AK47: The Story Of The People's Gun is a deeply frustrating book. Michael Hodges has clearly done his research - meeting General Kalashnikov (and visiting the brothel in the original manufacturing plant), getting shot at in Iraq, interviewing former child soldiers - but fundamentally, he's written articles for Esquire and it shows. He has the glimmerings of a theme - the AK as brand, as revolutionary totem, as a devil which poisons every culture it touches - but he's never quite able to bring them into the light. But just as anyone with an AK is a killing machine (Mikhail Kalashnikov went a lot further than Sam Colt towards making man equal), anyone writing about the AK can terrify you. Reading about the state of Kalashnikov cultures, I found myself looking up and down the Tube thinking, dear heavens, imagine London's nutters and monsters equipped with these. And then the next chapter tells me that in the late nineties there was at least one AK47 in Finsbury Park mosque and it has never been recovered.

Copyright term on sound recordings to remain 50 years because "extending the term could harm Britain's trade balance and provide little practical benefit to artists while hampering creativity and consumers"; ageing musos and industry plutocrats predictably throw toys out of pram.

The smoking ban. Catherine Tate as the Doctor's companion next season. The death of Fopp. The weather. And just because that's not enough bad news to be getting on with, the Chavez/Ahmadinejad supervillain team-up rolls on. "Today Hugo Chavez is the most talkative, launching a tirade against the "barbarians" he says have invaded Iraq, and comparing them with the barbarians he says destroyed the ancient civilisations of Latin America." Now, by now I would hope anyone reading this journal appreciates that I am not naturally on the side of aggressive Catholic imperialism, but he is talking about civilisations which practised mass human sacrifice. Civilisations whose own subjectt states allied with the invaders because anything had to be better than being a source of blood and beating hearts for the Aztec death gods - and who, in spite of the ensuing conquistador atrocities, were probably right. But no, as far as the Secret Society of Supervillains, sorry, 'Axis of Unity', is concerned, because those death cults were enemies of the West, they must have been the good guys. Next week: because the Jews opposed the sacrifice of children to Moloch, Ahmadinejad decides that even if it does oppose every tenet of islam, reinstituting the worship of Moloch can't be all bad.

Looking for some small candle to hold against this darkness, I find only unconfirmed possibilities; Boris Johnson is apparently 'not ruling out' standing for Mayor of London against the loathsome liche-lord who, in life, was known as Ken Livingstone. And in the new NME Eddie Argos mentions the formation of The English Travelling Wilburys - a supergroup featuring himself, Luke Haines, David Devant (presumably he means the Vessel)...and Frank Sidebottom. One fears these might both be back-of-beermat plans, destined to leave no more trace than the morning fog - but right now they would appear to be the closest things we've got to hope. Hell, even The Thick Of It seems to have lost its pinpoint accuracy; this week's special may still have had some good swearing, but in its failure to anticipate anything like the shape of the Labour leadership handover, it no longer felt like a smuggled report of the truth behind the scenes, and that was always at least as much of a factor in its appeal.

edit: Reading back through the friendslist, Stockholm Syndrome seems to be breeding excuses for the abomination Tate. As a public service, I offer a reminder of potential companions less inevitably dreadful than a reprise of Donna from The Worst Who Episode Ever:
Dalek Sec (having swapped his smart suit for a hoodie, better to appeal to Ver Kidz)
Russell T Davies' sphincter, expelling its contents onto the camera lens every five minutes
Adric
A Slitheen in a fez

For all that their last album was a bit of a debacle, I can't help but be excited by the news that the new Divine Comedy album has the working title 11 Modern Antiquities and some songs have been co-written with XTC's Andy Partridge.

Wole Soyinka "says that all "hidden atrocities" are revealed eventually, even if many years later. "It all comes to light in the end. So why don't these would-be Stalins and Hitlers take a leaf from history instead of burdening us with exposing their crimes? Why does it have to happen again and again?"" Well, Wole, maybe it's because they see that for the most part, it works. Yes, we all remember Hitler dying in the bunker as the tanks advanced, but he was arguably the anomaly. Stalin died in bed aged 74, and Mao 82, after full and contented lives of genocide and brutality. Even the dictators who are deposed as often as not end up in genteel exile rather than Death Row. You may have been "chief judge at a mock trial last November when Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir was found guilty in absentia of crimes against humanity in Darfur" - but he's still running the show, and with the West's interventionist will broken since Iraq, he's likely to continue running the show. Just like Mugabe, just like the junta in Burma, just like whichever faceless old bastard's running China these days. The triumph of virtue and the monsters vanquished is a plot one sees often - in fiction.

New Labour's Oofy Wegg-Prosser is apparently now working for a company which "has the Cyrillic rights to LiveJournal.com, the networking and blog site which has exploded in the country. Its content is, according to Wegg-Prosser, far more "sophisticated" than its English-language equivalent, with intellectuals, poets and novelists posting blogs." Interesting. For obvious reasons I haven't read many Cyrillic LJs, but one of the few I did see (clicking on people who shared one of my rarer interests) led with a picture of someone proudly showing off the vodka bottle rammed up their backside.

Saw some Twang matches earlier; if only I'd expected to see the Twang around the place, while having some accelerant to hand, I would have grabbed them for reasons of poetic justice. Hell, even NME is tiring of them already - they generally reserve 6/10 for the *second* album by bands they hyped ahead of the debut. I could almost feel sorry for the poor imbeciles, seeing their shot at the big time crumbling already - except of course that they're worthless oafs upon whom I wish every possible sorrow and degradation.