If my life was a film it'd be made by Miyazaki,I'd be following a bat around the hills of Nagasaki

[alexsarll]

Maybe not quite, but I have rather been dashing around the place - down to Christ Church & Upton in Lambeth for Riffs & Fragments, a night and a space I'd definitely recommend to anyone looking for a bit of an unusual venue and show. The supports were essentially Mikey Skinner dressed as Ian Curtis and Bjork doing Nico, and as for the headline and voyage home...well, the returned augstone has already written up the shocking truth.

I'm watching the Sopranos endgame on E4, and find myself ambivalent. It all seems so stately and formal; each episode sees most of the cast relegated to background colour as we follow Tony, and see two or three other characters in depth - except now they feel less like characters than pieces whose position we're being shown for the final moves. The Sopranos always excelled at capturing the irrelevances of life - lines like "Fvck blue, red sells!" and "You know how I feel about feet". Now, everything seems charged with meaning. It's a little too consciously Shakespearean.

Posters advising the people of Afghanistan that blowing heroin smoke in their children's faces might not be best paediatric practice; I'm surprised I've not yet seen this denounced as 'cultural imperialism' by the usual suspects.

Belated thoughts on Jonathan Ross in search of Steve Ditko: Neil Gaiman's voice has got much lighter and more transatlantic lately, hasn't it? And when he says Stan Lee was "obviously" right to insist on making Norman Osborne the Green Goblin, against Ditko's objection that "In real life, you wouldn't know who it was" - as fond as I am of the idea that everyone knows everyone really because there are only actually a few thousand real people, I don't know if that should extent to arch-enemies. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that Ditko was *obviously* right.
(Although when he described Watchmen's Rorschach as "like Mr A, except he's insane", I had to disagree. Not that I think Ditko's super-Objectivist Mr A was insane either, you understand. Just...principled)

On holiday this week, and off to Devon for a couple of days shortly; I'm sure I shall see some of you on my return, when I hope to attend Brontosaurus Chorus' Wednesday gig, and should definitely be at Thursday's Luxembourg show.

Comments

[moleintheground.livejournal.com]

Re - Sopranos - they had to do something like that. If things just carried on and then it ended and that was it, then it wouldn't really be worth having a final season. Anyway, it all levels up in the end.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I'll take your word for it. Though bloody Hell, I post at peak time and you're the only one who comments? How things change...

Anyway. final Comics Britannia - was it more of a mess, or I do I just know the territory better?

[moleintheground.livejournal.com]

Viz and 2000AD are both too big a deal to squeeze onto one show. A whole hour for 2000AD and its graduates would have been great. But I have loved the show, and I think it's been enthusiastic about its subject with enough nice detail (Ezquerra drawing his big blotchy outlines made me squee like all the girls we know watching a sad eyed penguin fall over) and enough wider picture detail to be well worth it. Right, off to watch the extra Alan Moore content now.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but even chronologically, why start with Viz rather than 2000AD? The punk parallels work fine if you have the latter as the Clash, then the former as the second generation shouty/comedy punks. And at times it was flat-out wrong, like referring to the Watchmen as a team name. Or indeed, the spelling of Ezquerra! But yes, great to see him, Gibbons, Moore et al.