On various topics excluding Lure Of The East, which was good but on which I have no useful comment

[alexsarll]

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.

Comments

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

One day I swear your tags section will be longer than your actual post.

Tell me more of the... pugs.

I have downloaded some Kanjani8 translated manga! The text is a bit too small for me to read on computer screens though so ... argh! I might sneakily print it out at some point. So far it is CRAZY ODD like WHOA.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Reading comics on computers is v.much non-ideal, and that's even with the stuff reading in the sensible direction...

I do kinda regret making a start on tagging, half the time I can't remember what categories I've set up and I've yet to find it useful, ever, but having started it it seems silly to stop and I'm sure it will come in useful one day. Right?

The pug was rubbing noses with a larger dog and then bouncing around in circles in an energetic and endearingly gormless fashion. It upped my joie de vivre approximately eight grillion per cent.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Dude it makes so little effing sense I can't even figure out which way round I should be reading it! I've never experienced such a syntax error before... not even with this human feeling they name "love".

I deleted a whole bunch of tags the other day - it helped! It's good for referencing things like baking or what have you, and sometimes it's just funny... and one's tag clouds are quite guilt inducing sometimes!

I LIKE PUGS.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

It would take a concerted effort of fun-hating not to like pugs, wouldn't it?

Though the dog in yr icon reminds me of a terrifying picture I saw this week in which someone had literally turned Gordon Brown's frown upside down and made him look like the Joker.

[stephens.livejournal.com]

Lots of things I buy have gone from tesco too, and with my spazzy eating I suspect they are not the same things, very odd indeed.

Is the noble closed in the interim then? Boo.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I don't know, presumably it would do their bottom line no good to stay shut but then I don't know what's up with the manager...

Items I am missing - spicy pasta sauce with peppers own brand, tomato and brown lentil soup, and I'm sure there was another but I've forgotten. And they don't seem to have been replaced by new lines, which I could understand - just more of the remainder. You?

[stoopidbird.livejournal.com]

Wait, have I missed something, is the Noble up for sale??

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Well, so I was told while we were drinking in the Bad Place, but presumably if there were a sign up, you would have seen it; from the crossroads I could see only that it was definitely shut that night.

[stoopidbird.livejournal.com]

hmmmm....who told you it was closing? Someone who works in the Bad Place? I have only ever been there once, a week or two after it was refurbed, whereupon I had the worst Sunday Lunch experience of my entire life and had such a polite yet firm list of complaints at the end that I got the entire lot, lunch for 12 people I think, for 0p.

Noble's open tonight, mind. Oh lord it had better not be closing, I'll be distraught! I might ask the barman dude we know next time we're in there for the info.

[brain-opera.livejournal.com]

I had awful food at the Bad Place too, we ended up complaining as well and got free food!

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Oh heavens no, I wouldn't take their word for...well, anything, really. A member of our party, but I forget which one. If it's open tonight, that would seem to indicate that the illness and the sale are coincidence, which is some reassurance.

[missfrancesca.livejournal.com]

I go away to the north for less than a week and you let them close The Noble? I wonder if my lack of custom caused a sharp dip in profits?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Clearly you were all that was keeping them afloat!

[missfrancesca.livejournal.com]

WE SHOULD HAVE DRUNK MORE!

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I don't think anyone could deny that we made a pretty good attempt to drink that place into the black!

[charleston.livejournal.com]

First paragraph. Makes me think of you in a tree. Love it!

[charleston.livejournal.com]

(by first paragraph I possibly mean first three paragraphs i.e. until "like Camelot never fell")

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I've not been up a tree since that last Finsbury Park picnic - but, the water tower in question is now a climbing wall!
(I've never used it myself. Climbing walls are a bit like running machines to me - who needs them when you've got the city?)

[tintintin.livejournal.com]

I haven't been to the Old... er, the Bad Place for years. In what way has it fallen from its previous (slight) grace?

Personally, I blame the general atmosphere of malaise on Boris, and the ripples heading back up the timelines from the impending 2012 Olympic cataclysm.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

They ran out of cider - draught and bottles. Though one barman didn't grasp the significance of an upturned pint glass on the pump handle. So I steeled myself to have some of the overpriced house red - and they'd run out of that too. And single spirit and mixer was £4.35 - maybe in a club, but in a Zone 3 pub? I rather think not?
And then factor in the problems it already had...

Obviously there have been waves and remissions, but I date the malaise back to Gordon's accession - which coincided pretty neatly with the 'early to bed, drones - you must be up early for work tomorrow' closure of the Victoria line, very much in keeping with his protestant work ethic. Any additional problems which have been noted since Boris got in are clearly the work of Werwolf-style saboteurs loyal to the Ken regime. In which light, his assiduous lobbying for the olympics could even be considered simply as just one more time bomb...

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I went to a couple of signings as a youngster, but these days I find the concept a little baffling, tbh. I only really go to them if it's a friend, to show support. Particularly if they've been hidden in a corner of the FP basement where half those attending can't find them so they feel all unloved.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

It's not a name where you'd expect to own and enjoy work by two of 'em, is it? I mean, jokes about the leader of the Labour Party also creating Devlin Waugh, and possibly being the Doctor too, always felt somewhat forced, but confusion here would be wholly legitimate.

I worry with Ellis - I mean, I hear he's great fun in person, but I even had to stop subscribing to Bad Signal because it was meaning that when I read his comics, I felt like I was getting retreads. Reading Astonishing., for instance, I can take the reference to the ship-breaking yards on the Subcontinent in my stride, but I bet there were two weeks of mailouts about it, something like six months back...