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

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

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

I wasn't having much luck getting in the mood for the final Stay Beautiful on Saturday, until I realised that never mind the weather, my main problem might be that I was listening to a steady stream of grumpy Americana (Two Gallants, Drive-By Truckers, Tom Waits) - so I chucked on some Placebo instead, and I was back in the zone. Already knew what I was wearing; the same shirt and tie I wore to the first Stay Beautiful, back in 2001 when most of the recent regulars would never have got past even SB's splendidly lax ID policies of the early days (Hell, one of the DJs was underage). Back before I knew any of the people I've met at SB (and so many people that is, lovers and friends and mates and just people you know to nod to if you see them somewhere else), or all the people I then met through them. Even before the club existed the messageboard did, and that was probably my second regular online hang-out, long before Livejournal - indeed, it was a conversation-cum-running joke on the SB board which resulted in the creation of this very journal, because I refused to create my own.
So yes, same shirt and tie, plus black suit again. Like how in Sandman, none of the other Endless ever calls Death by her name, because she's not only and not always Death, and we always meet her twice, we just don't remember the first time. Look, it made sense to me, OK?
And right from the start, there were old faces and new and the whole thing is still in my head as a rush of sensations which can't quite be put into words and would really best be conveyed as some kind of vertiginous montage, helped by my spending most of the evening at exactly the right pitch of drunkenness, that sort where everything just seems somehow epic (in the real sense, not just the general term of approval), all dancing and kissing and glitter everybloodywhere.
Unless some of us end up in positions of (cultural) power, I don't think Stay Beautiful is ever going to enter the cultural discourse like the Hacienda or Studio 54 or Shoom; it never spawned a sound that took on the world, for starters. Hell, it doesn't even get talked about like Trash, and I went to Trash, and it was dreadful. Its legacy is more social than cultural, but for a time, it was our place. And then as we drifted away, it still managed to find a new 'us' and become their place, and what do you know, lately the old us and the new 'us' have got to know each other a bit more and we got on too. It's sad that it's over, but it managed so much more than most clubs ever do, knit the threads together. Even if it never gets to be on the noughties nostalgia checklist, we'll remember. Goodbye, Stay Beautiful.

I've only mentioned Primeval once this series, early on, when I worried that the changes to the format meant it was losing its charm. But over the past few weeks it's become increasingly clear that I should post again to say - I was wrong. I have no idea how long they can keep this up, but the past few episodes have shown a delightful determination to leave no stone of bonkersness unturned. They've not totally ditched the format - each week is still likely to feature a dinosaur or similar turning up through a hole in time or 'anomaly', rampaging around outer London eating stuff, and then being foiled by Our Heroes. But oh, such flexibility they've found in that format. The team has been shaken up - not least by having one of the main characters unexpectedly killed, in a mid-series episode where you're initially certain that there will be a way out of that - and there isn't. Jason Flemyng is not a great actor by any means, but he has the right sort of puppyish enthusiasm for a role where you get to eg bait dinosaurs with helicopters.
Two weeks ago, the plot formulated a situation whereby it made sense for Our Heroes to be running around some woods, unarmed, being chased by prehistoric killer ostriches against whom the only defence was dodging through a minefield. Last week, we got a double anomaly: a dinosaur turns up in the Middle Ages, and then the dinosaur and the knight who has of course taken it for a dragon end up in a modern wrecker's yard, which the knight not unreasonably decides is Hell. And that was all before the first ad break, it got stranger after that. Tomorrow, it looks like we're headed off to the post-apocalyptic future to which anomalies open up whenever they need a creature so outlandish that even the vast bestiaries of the past cannot supply it. And while I've never used ITV's iPlayer equivalent, it seems to have four episodes of Primeval available at a time. Give one a try.

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.

Theory: neckties were not an echo of the Roman soldier's neck-rag in the past, but a precursor of earphone leads in the future. Which is why the period of their die-off coincides so closely with the gradual arrival of that for which they played John the Baptist.

Friday: to the Wilmington, where you must not step past the green pillar with your drink because of 'Residents'. No, not in the sense that eyeball-headed monsters will get you. Well, I don't think so. This in spite of the fact that the other side of the same residential block is a square solely occupied by teenage girls getting raucously drunk in a manner which would doubtless provoke an appalled Skins reference if the papers got hold of it. The other risk of being outside is that you get girls at that stage where you genuinely can't tell if they're mixed-race or just really overdid the fake tan trying to get you along to Venus 'nightclub' (and it shouldn't need saying, but that's arguably NSFW). Do they really get much success touting for that outside indie gigs?
The band bringing the drums were late, and aren't quite cute enough to make up for the lack of songs. Because of their lateness, no soundchecks: myfirstkitchen and her Maffickers are having monitor trouble but sound fine in the crowd. However, Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring seem to suffer, their usual magic tragically absent on a day when our hearts were full of spring. I decide that although I ought to check out headliners Cats on Fire, particularly now I've finally got it straight in my head that they aren't middle-class student wankers Cats in Paris (three of the top 10 Google results for that phrase lead you to blogs written by people I know called Steve), this is not the time, and hightail it to the Noble, where the Addlestones is now 10p more expensive, and tastes soapy.
Saturday: fugitivemotel's engagement party. The transition from the glorious, barely-even-evening sun of the walk down to the gentle gloom of the bar leaves me feeling suddenly sleepy, and I initially worry that the rape jokes are not giving his fiancee the best impression of his friends, but by evening's end we're siding with her in an argument, which should count for a lot.
Sunday: join the second half of a genteel Soho pub crawl compered by my_name_is_anna. Well, I think it's genteel, but I'm only half as drunk as the rest of them. Soho really is horrifically gentrified these days though, isn't it? Then up to the Noble again. Pints still priced too high, but no longer soapy. That's something.

Neil Gaiman's 'Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?' concluded perfectly; in spite of the title, I was reminded less of Alan Moore's 'Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?' than of the afterlife metaphysics his next novel, Jerusalem will apparently propose. One imperfection, though - you know those 'Got milk?' ads? There's one in here with Chris Brown, talking about how "the protein helps build muscle". Muscle you can use for beating your girlfriend Rihanna black and blue, for instance. Given some of the daft things DC have censored at the last minute (Superman with a beer, for instance) you'd think this could have been pulled.
At the other end of the Gaiman/Batman axis, I finally found in the library the first volume of Mark Waid's The Brave and the Bold, not as Bat-centric as the old title - and like most Waid it's good, undemanding superhero fun. Which makes a mockery of DC editorial's claims that Vertigo and the DC Universe are separate by having a plot turning around the Book of Destiny, and even a scene with Supergirl and Lobo meeting him in his garden. Next time John Constantine gets left out of a big mystical crossover, they're going to need a new excuse.
It's also the first time I've seen more than a couple of panels of the new Blue Beetle, but he seems like a nice kid, and if he was always this entertaining I can understand why people are upset about his title getting cancelled.
Over at Marvel, Apparitions and Ultraviolet writer Joe Ahearne spins off from Mark Millar's Fantastic Four and spoilers the end of his Wolverine in Fantastic Force, whose backmatter has something rather more interesting than the usual set of sketches - a first draft of the script, from comparison of which with the final issue we can see exactly how much a writer new to comics gets smacked around by editorial and told no, you cannot use that character, or have this one doing that. Worth a look even if you have no direct interest in the comic itself, though that's not bad.

A moment of unexpected beauty: walking to the dole office, hardly the highlight of my week, I find myself striding through a rain of blossom just as, on my earphones, the Indelicates' 'Unity Mitford' peaks. I've just found a lovely map of fairy places, but can't help but feel it has slightly missed the point when enchantment lurks around every corner if you get the moment right. And so often this week, the moment has been right - spring just starting to feel confident that it's here to stay, the grass going mad to get as close to the sun as quickly as possible, everything alive. Everything possible.

Gigging galore over the past week; last night was the first full Soft Close-Ups show, in the Vibe Bar. Does Brick Lane have more curry houses or complete tossers? It's a close-run thing. The Vibe Bar seems to acquire new rooms every time I visit, and now has an atrium, a giant eagle, a postbox and what looks like a hotel. The set was hampered by the poor sound quality one comes to expect at multimedia art happening experiences, but otherwise wonderful, and I'm not just saying that because augstone took my advice after the last show about resurrecting the axe god moves, pedals and feather boa. Or feather boar, as I just typed.
On Tuesday at the less up-own-jacksie Lexington, Jonny Cola & the A-Grades and Glam Chops, both as stylish and pop as ever, the latter with a new jumpsuit for Eddie, whose new Art Brut album came out the day before but who was still here playing small shows with two of his side-projects. The other being Keith Top Of The Pops And His Minor UK Indie Celebrity All-Star Backing Band, a poorly-recorded version of whose excellent show you can see here. I can't decide whether the highlight was 'I Hate Your Band', with thedavidx and James Rocks playing each other's guitars while Keith sings "you could swap members, you could swap songs", or Fvck The MSP, with its rousing final chant of "Nicky Wire can suck my cock", something I hesitate to mention on the internet lest someone write the slash fic where Nicky Wire does exactly that to all 16 members of the band, including the girls.

Listening to the new Decemberists album, I wonder, as I did with the last two, why the same band who can sound so genuinely...unearthly is the wrong word, because I think of our Earth's past, or at least our Earth's past as it should have been, so say 'out of time'...on most of the songs, manage to sound so like a pedestrian indie outfit on the rest. The one which appears to have escaped from a poor PJ Harvey album in particular. Still, all considerably better than the new Bat For Lashes, which I don't even know why I bothered stealing - it doesn't even have one delightfully eerie single like the first album, it's just boil-in-the-bag kookiness for dull people.

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

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

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

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

Yes, I should be out enjoying the sun, and everyone else will be so this will go unread, but I'm waiting for the washing machine and I have a week to get down before it slips my mind. A week spent mostly in Devon, where some newly-revealed clay from about 150 million years ago had its first encounter with the mammalian age when I plunged in up to the knees while looking for ammonites, and I went to Jasper Hazelnut's cafe, and saw someone with a hare lip outside ads for Third World children for the first time I can remember, and couldn't really blog on account of a deranged cursor. The train to Devon is lovely, following a stream much of the way and passing fields with cows, and llamas, and in one case horses and chickens grazing contentedly together.

And when the nights drew in, what did I watch?
Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle: good, but perhaps not as good as we all expected after his long absence from our screens. An out comics fan has no place attacking adults for reading Harry Potter, but beyond that, simply filming stand-up feels weird, like watching a straight filming of a stage play.
Given Mad Men's scrupulous sixties style, what the blazes were they doing soundtracking the opening of last week's episode with the Decemberists? Yes, they sound timeless, and it wasn't as if Don Draper was getting into MIA, but it still threw me.
I only watched the first episode of Party Animals, but my mum's a fan and had missed the final episode, so I watched along - an unusual experience for me, who is never normally a casual viewer. The main interest, of course, being to see what the Eleventh Doctor's performance was like. I'm still mainly repeating 'Trust Moffat. Trust Moffat' to myself. Andrea Riseborough and Excelsor from No Heroics were good, though, if basically playing the same characters (the devious slapper and the smug git).
The Tomb of Ligeia is the last and not the best of the Roger Corman/Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe films, in part because one of the major roles is the possibly-possessed cat, and as anyone who's seen Breakfast at Tiffany's will know, cats can't act - they can at best be thrown onto the set by the AD. Typically, the film owes as much to Poe's 'M.Valdemar' as 'Ligeia', but more than anything else Vincent Price seems to be playing James Robinson's Shade, right down to the hat and the glasses. No bad thing, obviously.

"The Pope also warned of a threat to the Catholic Church...from the "growing influence of superstitious forms of religion". Next week; why racism threatens Nazism. Sidious' deranged ramblings about condoms in Africa are, of course, a despicable attempt to take advantage of the vulnerable, but closer to home, last night on Stroud Green Road there was a team, dressed like bouncers, of 'Street Pastors', strolling around at closing time looking for the lost and lonely like so many spiritual date-rapists.
(And with perfect timing, as I finished writing this some more of the scoundrels came to my door. Given I'd discharged my bile here, I didn't even have enough fire left for more than a curt 'No Thank You' and a slammed door)

As many of you will doubtless already have seen all over your friendslists, the New Royal Family once again decided to use my 'unconvincing disapproval' face to spice up the video to their latest smash, which for all I know may be the last music video Britons can watch on Youtube. The NRF are also playing the Gaff on Holloway Road this evening, so why not come along and see if I can look as unconvincingly disapproving in the flesh? Or alternately just watch the band, which would probably be a better idea all round.

Which item leads because it at least makes me look halfway cool, and since last posting, I have been otherwise been engaging in high-grade geekery to such a degree that even I still feel a little nervous about admitting to it. Well, OK, and I did go to lovely Soul Mole. But still, too many dice. As has been pointed out, compared to the various other midlife crises on offer, it's less deleterious than most.

I'm reading Graham Greene's The Human Factor - not one of his best, thus far. But it is a late effort, coming from 1978. Which feels weird right off - Graham Greene, whose Greeneland always feels so thoroughly mid-20th Century, was writing during my life. I'd...not even forgotten when he died, just never even considered the notion that he might not have passed with his age, like the Elves departing Middle Earth for the Grey Havens. But he had a book out in 1988. He died in 1991 - the same year Will Self published his first book (which I mention not as a passing of the baton but because Self is one of the few writers anywhere near the modern British literary mainstream whom I think worth reading). 1991 is, of course, 18 years ago, which is odd because in my head the eighties are still only circa ten years ago. And is Greene being anachronistic by having MI6 business sealed over grouse shoots in 1978, or am I forgetting how much of old England still persisted then? Especially given recent musings on Black Box Recorder and Red Riding, I suspect it's at least as much the latter.

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

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

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

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

On last night's Mad Men, did I mishear or were Peggy's nephews called Gerard and Mikey? Never thought I'd catch a My Chemical Romance reference in Don Draper's sixties.

Bionic eye! And apparently one good enough to sort socks, something I only attempt by natural light. Then again, my socks are mainly tiny variations on the theme of 'black'.

I've seen the guy who walks his ferret in Finsbury Park itself a few times, but on Monday, shortly before heading off to explore Tottenham (whatever the view from Harringay station bridge might do to seduce you into thinking otherwise, I can report that it really isn't a whole other London of wonderment hidden away to the side), I saw a woman outside Tesco with an...albino stoat? A mink? It definitely had red eyes as well as white fur, so not just a winter coat on the usual one, and it was very fluffy - you could see how a Cruella type would look at it and see a stole.

Sad news from CMU:
SELECTADISC IN NOTTINGHAM TO GO
More doom and gloom. Nottingham independent record store Selectadisc is to close later this month, after its owner, Phil Barton, decided he can't pump any more money into the company. He told Music Week: "Everyone here has crawled across the field of broken glass to keep this open, but in the end it didn't work. I think it is one of the top three independent stores in Britain. But that doesn't stop it being uneconomic. Everyone here is aware of tough things have been for the last two years". High overheads, declining record sales and the credit crunch have all contributed to Selectadisc's position.
As previously reported, a recent Entertainment Retailers Association report said that there were now just 300 odd independent record stores left in the UK, compared to 408 at the start of last year, and 1064 ten years ago.
Back in the days before London, before the internet, Selectadisc - or back then, the three Selectadiscs spread along Market Street - were my shops. Derby eventually got in on the act with Reveal, but really, you wanted Nottingham - with those three, Wayahead and Arcade you'd always find at least one thing of which you'd vaguely heard, or which just looked intriguing, and which was cheap enough to take a punt on. OK, the staff in the singles shop were surly dance snobs, but that was forgivable when you'd find all the singles that had been raved about in Melody Maker two weeks previously marked down to a quid each.

Contrary to previous reports, apparently Grant Morrison's Authority is still happening: "It'll come when it comes. He's working on it." But no word on his WildCATS which, as of that last interview, was the one which was still happening. I'll believe them when I see them solicited. Maybe not even then, given what happened to The Boys and Micah Wright's Stormwatch, both also at Wildstorm.

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)

Recently took delivery of Saint Etienne's delayed new compilation, London Conversations, and have been thinking about how unlikely a band they are. Their danceable cover of hairy old Neil Young's 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' hit in 1990, the same year as Candy Flip's not dissimilar take on one of the few non-dreadful Beatles songs, 'Strawberry Fields Forever'. Would anyone have expected either of the acts behind these apparent novelties to go on to spend 20 years as one of Britain's most cherished, most quietly trailblazing cult bands? I can't think of such a deceptive start since Bowie first came to mass attention with 'The Laughing Gnome'.
And then a detour in my musings when, last night, cappuccino_kid took me to see Black Box Recorder. Because don't those two bands almost form a subgenre all their own? Two male survivors, who aren't fronting the bands but who definitely need to be on stage, not backroom boys. One frontwoman called Sarah, thought a bit flat by some but recognised by indie boys of a certain stripe as an aspect of the goddess; her stage persona is all about the innocence, maybe with a little tang of experience, but you know she's no puppet. And the songs all inhabit a world of England past. The difference being, Black Box Recorder are the England you hoped was past but fear might not be (behind the stage last night, a Union Jack emblazoned with ROCK AND ROLL NOT DOLE), where Saint Etienne are the past you hope is still there just below the surface (watching the 'Hobart Paving' video, I remember that King's Cross, and I miss it).
Support was Madam acoustic; I swear she looks younger than she used to when hospitalsoup was in her band, five years or more ago.

Interesting that today should bring further confirmation of Stephen Fry's status as a national treasure, as I was already planning to write a little about him, having yesterday read Simon Gray's Fat Chance. Some of you may remember that in 1995, Stephen Fry, then in a play called Cell Mates, disappeared, and was briefly feared to have killed himself before turning up on the Continent (very Black Box Recorder, come to think of it). Simon Gray was the author and director of that play, and aside from having previously loved his Smoking Diaries, I was intrigued by the possibility of A Book Which Didn't Like Stephen Fry. I mean, don't get me wrong, I think he's great, but just as I enjoy Lawrence Miles' anti-Steven Moffat agenda re: Doctor Who, I tend to find devil's advocates fun. Come on, if you'd lived in the ages of faith, wouldn't you have wanted to read The Three Impostors* even if you believed, just for naughtiness' sake? So Gray was royally let down by Fry, and the front cover quote is "Makes Mommie Dearest read like a Mother's Day card" - Mark Lawson, The Guardian. Well, that should have been my first warning. Granted, Smug Slug does sometimes restrict himself to stating the bleeding obvious, but more often he misses the point entirely, and Gray himself notes that "The Guardian, ever vigilant in its defence of truth and the decencies, published an article quoting the unfavourable reviews, neglecting to mention that the Guardian's own reviewer had written both warmly and intelligently about the play." And if there is a villain here it is the media, and the media's delight in reporting what the media is saying without ever deigning to return to primary sources - something of which we see even more these days simply because there's more media and more pages and airtime to fill, with results I'm sure I need hardly list and decry again. Gray does accuse Fry of certain crimes - a tendency to play himself, for instance, whether he is meant to be playing someone else, or just honestly being himself. Well, that's hardly news, and nor is it delivered in terms significantly more damning than Gray uses of himself in The Smoking Diaries. Fry comes across more as a sad figure than a mad one, and more mad than bad - and since he's come out as a manic depressive, none of this really does much to contradict his own acknowledgment of his situation. Part of me's disappointed that there is no anti-Fry book, but mostly I just think 'bless'. And posthumously bless cantankerous old Gray, too. Though the real hero of the tale, would you believe, is Rik Mayall.

*Which reminds me, sbp - any joy locating my copy of the Arthur Machen novel of the same name?

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.

Citizens of Finny P: anyone got any idea what's happened on Hanley Road? Neither Google News nor shopkeepers has anything. I would say that the Dairy finally got the reaction it deserves, except that it's still open for business and the police/medical presence seems to be concentrated around a red door next to the Chinese takeaway.

Scanning my spam folder for the inevitable victims of Gmail's over-eager gatekeeping, I see mails from earlier this week boasting "Become really wanted by women in 2008!" I'm used to viagra and bank scams, but spam selling time machines? Even only short-hop ones? That's tempting.

Left to my own devices on V-Day - Richmond's across the international date line or something - I contented myself with gigging and the (very full) Prom. The Sex Tourists and 18 Carat Love Affair both on fine form, the latter covering 'The Look of Love (Part 1)' which, while not the Lexicon of Love track I'd have chosen for Valentine's Day, is still clearly ace. Steve, having by now come to recognise me as an enthusiastic shouter-along on 'Five Rounds Rapid', got a bit overenthusiastic while sticking the mic in my face and chinned me, but hey, that's showbusiness.

All the crisp blogging lately has been about those new Walkers flavours, but for me the overlooked story is the pickled onion renaissance. The old-style Monster Munch got some attention, but as well as the return of the cyclic, yummy Pickled Onion Walkers Crisp, corner shops have lately started dangling a new challenger, Pickled Onion Crunchy Sticks, which I can strongly recommend. PO used to be my second favourite flavour, but salt & vinegar's not what it was - presumably because the saltiness necessary for a decent bite is anathema under new health agendas. Oh Walkers Max Salt & Vinegar, thou shouldst be living at this hour - but in your absence, increasingly I find pickled onion is where satisfying crisping is at. The downside being, the effect on one's breath is a lot more pernicious than with S&V.

Have abandoned Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian 100 pages in, about the latest I ever quit a book. Yes, the savagery, yes the prose, but...there was no through line. I suspected I was just going to get another 230 pages of the same and when the 'plot' is murderous picaresque, and the central character essentially a cypher, why would I want to do that? I can handle blank leads if it's, say, an early Angela Carter, because the book is shorter for one thing, but also because the incidents through which they travel have a dream-like logic, and a wonder to them. But for an atrocity exhibition like this, I need someone to follow.

I've learned my lesson when it comes to talking online about pubs I hope to use regularly (curse you, Neil Morrissey!) but since I'm not in West London very often, I have no hesitation in making this recommendation to those who are. The Pelican, near Portobello Road, loses points for a lack of draught cider, but since all the drinks seem to be the same price anyway, I object less to Bulmers. Good decor, properly twilit like an old-style pub but not scuzzy. Not bad music, except for the reggae. But here's the clincher - Thursday, from 6pm to 9pm, you order your drinks and then roll two dice. The bar also rolls two dice. You roll higher - your drinks are free. You don't - you just pay what you would have anyway. Obviously the gamer in me thinks that this lacks nuance - double 6 should be a critical hit, where you also get champagne, while on a double 1 you have critically failed, pay double and get punched in the face. But hey, it's their business. And I did see three double 1s rolled by punters, once twice by the same guy, so I can see how that might lose custom.
Portobello Road, though - that was one of the first London locations etched in my mind ("street where the riches of ages are sold"), and it looks to be dying on its arse. Half the shops are shut and look like that's long-term, and the rest were short on customers. Really took me aback. As did the 'coming attractions' signboard still up on the Astoria, and the realisation that Don Draper is only 35. Meaning that in the first series of Mad Men, set 18 months earlier, he was presumably 33. He can't only be two years older than me, he's a grown-up!

The first issue of Neil Gaiman's Batman story...maybe it was just because I read it drunk, but I have no idea where he's going with this. It is nonetheless brilliant, and coming so hot on the heels of Grant Morrison's third definitive take on the character, that's impressive. In other comics news, Kieron Gillen's Sabretooth one-shot is probably not essential reading for all Phonogram fans, but is pretty good, and the new issue of Captain Britain has DRACULA MEETING DOCTOR DOOM ON THE MOON. I love comics.

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.

Outside my window the sun is slowly sinking behind an enormous mountain range of snowcloud, with the peachy glimmers of its light just flowing around the uppermost edge, and most of the cloud left totally opaque. I say 'slowly', but you can very nearly see the sun move - think London Eye speed - and because the cloud is so thick you can look straight at it. It's an old light it gives, but not a tired light, and that's so reassuring. It's not snowing here right at the moment, but my walk earlier took me through a couple of flurries - happily, as when that first lot came I had wet hair, so couldn't go outside to play in it. Worrying over missing things is usually unnecessary, and always unhelpful.

Mark Twain wrote that "Dollis Hill comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I ever occupied", and given I like exploring the far reaches of this great city anyway, that mandated a visit. augstone fancied some daytime drinking - so let's combine the two, we thought, and go for a Dollis Hill pub crawl!
First problem: Dollis Hill has no pubs. Seriously. At its heart, Gladstone Park, and around that, pleasant London suburbia, not dissimilar to the quieter and less exotic regions of Highgate, but less spooky. Gladstone Park, likewise, is a sort of Waterlow or Alexandra Park disrupted by a railway through its midriff - perhaps absent in Twain's day. Maybe those other lands of which Dollis Hill reminds me were also as yet unbuilt, and learned from Dollis Hill's example? My historical sense of London's expansion is patchy, given I tend to regard anything which belongs in London as having always been here*. There are pubs near Dollis Hill, but always just over a road into industrialisation, proletarianism or Irishness. Our original plan was "meet in the pub nearest the station" but, under expert advice, I had checked Fancyapint, just in case, while worrying that Aug might feel this compromised the expeditionary spirit. Thank heavens I did. Its favoured suggestion was full of old Irish soaks, which is fine, and in the midst of some carpentry, which is allowable, but was also playing 'The Wind Beneath My Wings', so we didn't stay. Everything else the web had suggested would be heading back down towards Kilburn, so instead we investigated the Ox & Gate, which had nice leather chairs. The gents here had a huge stash of empty sleeves for hooky p0rn DVDs; clearly these are purchased alongside boy films the mrs would never think to investigate, and then secreted inside the actioner's sleeve. Cunning. We cross the North Circular a bridge too early, passing a supplier of sex equipment on one side and a purveyor on the other. This doesn't seem a particularly libidinous area, but perhaps there's nothing else to do? The reservoir is unusually birdless, having fewer than the tiny pond in Gladstone Park; maybe the ducks really like the naked statue in the park pond, Maybe Mark Twain did too.
We head back via Willesden Green, hoping that not being Dollis Hill proper, there may be pubs. We pass two carpet shops and two auto parts shops before we see anything even faintly resembling one, instead contenting ourselves with Crazy Cock - a Bulgarian restaurant rather than another fleshpot. They have folk music TV playing - does Britain, with all its music channels, have anything of the sort? There are forests and fine jackets, and Aug wants a residency. I knew nothing of Bulgarian cuisine before, in spite of an ancestor helping to underwrite the country's foundation, but can now tell you that they do very fine things with cheese.
Then, via a brief stop at a gastro affair which is at least visible from Willesden Green station, back to the centre. I have always steered clear of the Old Blue Last before, suspecting that anywhere owned by Vice magazine would probably be full of tossers. I am slightly wrong, in that the crowd are not so much hipsters as their larval form. I am reminded of the old moral dilemma - if you could go back in time and kill Bloc Party when they were as yet innocent of their crimes, would it be justified? Not that I could ever see the dilemma, mind. Even in the version which substitutes Hitler, the only worry is the practical consideration of whether that might have given Stalin a freer hand. Anyway, the Old Blue Last still manages its own spot of Pub Fail; they have at least three draught pints off with no glasses over the pumps, the felchratchets. First act on is one Kit Richardson, who looks like Imelda Staunton dressed as Little Boots, and sounds like a third-rate Tori Amos. Do Not Want. The 18 Carat Love Affair, however, are excellent as ever even in this terrible place; there's a song I don't recognise called 'Eleanor' which is every bit as good as the rest of their material. Aug says he doesn't really know who to compare them to, sound-wise, and I know what he means, and I think that's a good thing.
The next band on feature a former member of Special Needs. We don't stay.

Undecided on nu-Skins as yet, though given how much more the first two series were than the first episode let on, I'm certainly planning to keep watching. The new male leads seem more irksome, though, consisting as they do of a lout, a hairstyle and the OCD kid who appears to have escaped from The Big Bang Theory. Still, we have lovely lovely Effy (and I believe I'm now allowed to say that without going on the Register), and scatty Pandora, and the twins and Naomi Campbell seem promising. As does the new teacher, although having Ardal O'Hanlon playing a cross between Roy from The IT Crowd and Dylan Moran strikes one as a sort of mad science experiment in concentrated Irishness.
(Am also watching the third series of Oz, and idly wondering whether there's any possibility of a crossover)

*For instance, that scene in A Knight's Tale with the Eye revolving beside the mediaeval Thames? Perfect.