Couple of BBC radio shows of possible interest: a documentary on Banshees and Magazine guitarist John McGeogh, with contributors including Howard Devoto and, as of tomorrow, one about the mighty HBO, with Stroud Green Road habitue Aidan Gillen taking part. I should also have mentioned the Paul Morley programme about celebrity culture, but forgot after the first part, and the second wasn't nearly as interesting.

It's worth seeing Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum in David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow simply because it's a script that gives two great character actors a lot of opportunities to have a whale of a time shouting good lines at each other. But that's not necessarily to say it's a good play. Mamet is much better at writing men with men than women, so in the second act, when it's Goldblum and Laura Michelle Kelly, everything sags rather. I don't know her - apparently she's mostly done musicals - and I wouldn't say she's a bad actress, but she doesn't grab the attention like Spacey and Goldblum do - though with the material Mamet gives her, can she really be held to blame? If you want to consider this play as a story, not a vehicle, I think it's fundamentally flawed.
Summary of plot:
Spacey wants Goldblum to make a prison blockbuster starring a hot property actor. But should Goldblum instead make a film of apocalyptic Great American Novel The Bridge?
Flaws in plot:
- The Bridge is rubbish. We hear plenty of excerpts, and I'm not sure whether Mamet has deliberately written it as a parody of the sort of impenetrable toss which a certain type of critic loves, but that's what it is.
- Apparently the problem with filming The Bridge is that it's about the end of the world, and Hollywood doesn't like films about the end of the world. Is this play set in some bizarre parallel universe, or just incredibly dated? If the latter, what period would that be? Because I am hard pressed to think of any long period without a big doomsday film. If anything, The Bridge sounds like a rubbish version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the big-budget film of which is already in development.
- Goldblum has just been promoted - he's about to make his first film as co-producer. At no stage does anyone suggest hey, let's do the prison blockbuster and *then* make The Bridge! Even though the blockbuster already has a script, while The Bridge would need rights bought, an adaptation commissioned...a delay, in other words, during which Goldblum can easily cement his position with the more commercial film.
Nonsense, in other words, but entertaining nonsense. Much like the power ballads night I attended afterwards at the new Monarch, which used to be the Misty Moon and before that the Chalk Farm Road Wetherspoon's, and as such shouldn't work at all as a venue, but sort of does.

I can't imagine why Woolworths could ever find its market position threatened when it's selling such well-conceived items as the Lolita bed for young girls. Which reminds me rather of Alan Moore's comment re: Lost Girls that "It's a stick and a carrot combined, that for the purposes of commerce it can flood your mind with the most licentious ideas and imagery but woe betide anybody who actually finds themselves in this inflamed state and responds. Because then they are a dirty, filthy person who responds to p0rnography", and makes me want to write something about Lost Girls, which I started reading during its abortive serialisation 13 years ago and eventually got to finish a couple of weeks back, on what happened to be the night before the More4 broadcast of Chris Langham's apologia. The problem is, I'd still feel fundamentally uneasy because I would be blogging about p0rn, an unease only emphasised by how many words I'd have to deliberately mis-spell to avoid blocking the friendslist of those people who read LJ in monitored workplaces. We're none of us quite free, are we?

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.

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

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

I never took to Gaslight on screen (I may have attempted the wrong version), but the Old Vic's stage version was another matter. It's much stronger for observing the unities...well, most of them; for a psychological thriller, once or twice it does come a little close to French farce, at least once accidentally. The Bond girl and Pompey both give excellent performances, but the surprise for me was Andrew Woodall; where Anton Walbrook was far too obviously sinister as the husband, he makes a believable Victorian paterfamilias, much more ambiguous as he infantilises his wife, much more plausible. And the real surprise for me was how much that theme's played up, how strong a feminist statement the play makes - because from the four novels I've read, most of Patrick Hamilton's women are absolute bitches.

After a whole season of Russell T Davies smugly grinning and SFX techs geeking, I abandoned Doctor Who Confidential, but I made an exception for the Stephen Moffat episode because Moffat always gives good interview. I had no idea, though, that we'd get him and Tennant interviewing each other around Television Centre and a generall great documentary out of it. But the most moving bit came, surprisingly, from RTD, when he talked about how, as a kid, he always thought that at any moment you could turn the corner and see the TARDIS there, door half-open.
Which reminded me of the TARDIS-a-like 'phone box in Derby Children's Hospital, and rushing towards that half-open door, and finding only a payphone inside. I wonder if that's where it all began to go wrong?

Didn't make it to Stokefest in the end - my sources informed me of crowding, and summer crowds are not my idea of fun. But the local history...that I liked. Rampaging elephants! Bob Hoskins! Mutant milkmaids! Finsbury Park has had it all. Maybe even Ho Chi Minh, though the evidence there was hazier. Plus, the definitive sources on all this include the work of Ken Gay. Now, you'd think a name like that was hard to beat, right? But you'd be reckoning without his collaborator, Dick Whetstone.

Never mind the stripper vicars - what about a flasher judge?