Another week without early mornings
Nov. 9th, 2009 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexsarllSorry to everyone whose birthdays and gigs I didn't make on Saturday, had a birthday of someone I'd not seen in far too long to attend in deepest Tufnell Park. The place started off very full on account of footballism, so we ended up in one of those internal pub crawl situations where every time a bigger and better table comes clear, you dash for it, sometimes holding on to the original table too, until eventually you realise you've over-expanded and cannot sustain your conquests. As one friend said, "like the Japanese empire in World War II - but without the rape camps".
On Friday I went to see![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xandratheblue and retro_geek DJ the Doe Face Lilian gig in Kilburn. Disappointingly, Doe Face Lilian have still yet to start coming on stage in a Trojan horse for a 'Doe Face Ilium' visual pun which I would appreciate enormously, but the girls played Swimmer One and The Ark, so I was happy. And yesterday, an autumnal Essex Tubewalk followed by local drinks which I had to leave early when I realised I could no longer feel my toes. Either it's the end of the sitting outside season, or I need some new socks.
There's a new album out by a bit of a cult figure who combines utter self-obsession and a bit of a knack for losing his audience, with a clear need for adulation. But Robbie Williams has had quite enough press lately, it's the new Luke Haines which is puzzling me. As we settle in for another winter of discontent, his Seventies obsession suddenly seems strangely prescient - but because that would make things too easy, he also has to include a three-piece spoken word tale of modern art pseuds and trepanation. And simply to fly in the face of the received wisdom on double albums, he's separated 21st Century Man and Achtung Mutha on to two CDs even though they'd easily fit on one (with a silent track between them to enforce the break). Bless his wilfully perverse little heart.
I've been reading Doctor Who books again, having ground to a halt a while back from the sheer repetitive grind of the Sabbath epic (in brief: after the Time Wars, an amnesiac Doctor is up against a human with mysterious backers who has set up as a new Time Lord, and is attempting to condense the multiverse down into one timeline). Decided to take a break from those and instead read Spiral Scratch, an attempt to give the Sixth Doctor a proper send-off what with him having had the worst regeneration scene in the show's history. And...oh dear, it's all about the multiverse again, and a villain trying to kill off alternate timelines. And yes, this coincidence in my reading order is hardly the writer's fault, but multiple versions of the same character is such an easy thing to do badly, and at the same time I was reading Charlie Stross' 'Palimpsest' where it's done so well, and the Buzzcocks references scattered through this are just tiresome given I was always more of a Magazine man, and...gah, basically. There are moments which make me feel like I didn't totally waste my time - glimpses of Evelyn and Frobisher, the sheer love for the Sixth Doctor which comes through - but mostly it's exactly the sort of second-rate fanservice people expect from the books, and it's such a shame there were so many like that in between the Lance Parkins and Paul Cornells and Lawrence Mileses of the enterprise.
On Friday I went to see
xandratheblue and retro_geek DJ the Doe Face Lilian gig in Kilburn. Disappointingly, Doe Face Lilian have still yet to start coming on stage in a Trojan horse for a 'Doe Face Ilium' visual pun which I would appreciate enormously, but the girls played Swimmer One and The Ark, so I was happy. And yesterday, an autumnal Essex Tubewalk followed by local drinks which I had to leave early when I realised I could no longer feel my toes. Either it's the end of the sitting outside season, or I need some new socks. There's a new album out by a bit of a cult figure who combines utter self-obsession and a bit of a knack for losing his audience, with a clear need for adulation. But Robbie Williams has had quite enough press lately, it's the new Luke Haines which is puzzling me. As we settle in for another winter of discontent, his Seventies obsession suddenly seems strangely prescient - but because that would make things too easy, he also has to include a three-piece spoken word tale of modern art pseuds and trepanation. And simply to fly in the face of the received wisdom on double albums, he's separated 21st Century Man and Achtung Mutha on to two CDs even though they'd easily fit on one (with a silent track between them to enforce the break). Bless his wilfully perverse little heart.
I've been reading Doctor Who books again, having ground to a halt a while back from the sheer repetitive grind of the Sabbath epic (in brief: after the Time Wars, an amnesiac Doctor is up against a human with mysterious backers who has set up as a new Time Lord, and is attempting to condense the multiverse down into one timeline). Decided to take a break from those and instead read Spiral Scratch, an attempt to give the Sixth Doctor a proper send-off what with him having had the worst regeneration scene in the show's history. And...oh dear, it's all about the multiverse again, and a villain trying to kill off alternate timelines. And yes, this coincidence in my reading order is hardly the writer's fault, but multiple versions of the same character is such an easy thing to do badly, and at the same time I was reading Charlie Stross' 'Palimpsest' where it's done so well, and the Buzzcocks references scattered through this are just tiresome given I was always more of a Magazine man, and...gah, basically. There are moments which make me feel like I didn't totally waste my time - glimpses of Evelyn and Frobisher, the sheer love for the Sixth Doctor which comes through - but mostly it's exactly the sort of second-rate fanservice people expect from the books, and it's such a shame there were so many like that in between the Lance Parkins and Paul Cornells and Lawrence Mileses of the enterprise.
