'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

The Dark Knight is not, contra IMDB, the best film ever (but then look what they've got at #2 - ugh!). It's not even the best film about a non-powered billionaire playboy superhero released this year - Robert Downey Jr is Stark is Iron Man, whereas Christian Bale, though he plays a brilliant Bruce Wayne, only in the car chase and the climactic fight ever convinced me he was Batman, as opposed to just a guy in a Batman suit. It is, however, bloody good. All this talk of a posthumous Oscar for Heath Ledger - well, I'd approve, obviously, because it'd be an Oscar going to a frakking SUPERVILLAIN as against some sententious middlebrow issue movie, and because his death-by-Method would really raise the bar next time Tom Hanks or similar git wants a cheap win by playing a retard - "No, sorry Tom, these days that would actually require you to suffer severe brain damage". Well, I'd be happy to help 'coach' him with an iron bar...but I digress. Heath Ledger plays a damn fine Joker, drawing on both 'The Killing Joke' and Arkham Asylum and managing that rare feat of actually making him *funny*, as against a Stalin whose crap jokes you laugh at because otherwise he'll kill you. But this is not his film, it's Aaron Eckhart's; this is Harvey Dent's story and he plays a better Dent than I think I ever saw the comics manage.
( minor spoilers )

Went to have a look at Burne-Jones' Sleep of Arthur in Avalon at the Tate yesterday. Obviously he's my King in a way no Windsor could ever be, but I was still reminded that Burne-Jones is really not my favourite pre-Raphaelite; this painting is acknowledged unfinished, but set against Rossetti or Millais or Waterhouse (as he is in the Tate) his works all look a little that way, lacking some final glaze - or the breath of life - to really give that great pre-Raphaelite impression of being a glance though some charmed casement into faerie.
(They've also got Flaming June in from the same lender - both the paintings are in the free access areas so if you're a fan, drop in, but be warned their lighting is still atrocious, reflection and glint all over the place. Also, there's some asinine Martin Creed conceptual piece going on next door which as so often, is based on an OK idea but not really thought through)

Club night becomes religion to dodge anti-flyering byelaw.

I didn't even know there was a film adaptation of Jan Potocki's Manuscript found in Saragossa until I saw the DVD at my parents'; they had never heard of the book and had just had the DVD pressed on them by a friend. Neil Gaiman summarises the book better than I could; the film manages a remarkably full and faithful adaptation of this bizarre mish-mash of a book, getting the Goya-style chills and the absurdist sitcom in there as close as can be. Apparently lead actor Zbigniew Cybulski was considered 'Poland's James Dean' - which shows you how bad things must have been behind the Iron Curtain, 'cos to me he's more Brendan Fraser meets David Mitchell. Fortunately, that's just what you want in Alphonse van Worden.

Sentences which could easily be misinterpreted: "I was mourning the end of a long-term relationship with a massive bender."

Grant Morrison has abandoned The Authority, putting most of the blame on the predominantly poor reviews the first issue received. What? Where would he be, where would we be, if he'd quit Animal Man or Doom Patrol or JLA over the reviews which missed the point? Even with his current Batman run, a lot of people were underwhelmed until he deployed the issue that pulled it all together. On top of which, this is a man who more than anyone else understands art's roots in magic. That first, brilliant set-up issue of The Authority began with our world, our poor hero-less world...and then threw in The Authority to save us. You can't leave a spell like that half-cast, man! And for pity's sake, it was only meant to be a four issue run anyway. If he'd been on schedule in the first place, it would all have been written before those bad reviews even appeared.
I'm still looking forward to his DC Universe stuff, obviously. But this has really dented my respect for him.

It's little more than a month since I first saw The Long Blondes live; this time I knew the new album and they played 'You Could Have Both', but I still have my reservations, and they come down to one thing: Kate Jackson's not the 'Kate Jackson' of the songs. I say this not as any criticism of her, you understand - only with the same sense of regret as accompanied my realisation that Viggo Mortensen is not actually Aragorn. I love the Blondes' music for its loneliness, the predatory gleam in its eye, its desperation. My kind host cappuccino_kid tells me that in the smaller shows in earlier days, more of that sort of stuff came across. But at a triumphant Forum show, with the crowd singing back every line...well, Kate's too busy having fun to get caught up in all that angst, and who can blame her? It suits some of the songs (from 'Guilt' onwards, the show really comes alive) but I am forced to conclude that, like St Etienne among others, for me The Long Blondes are a band where the live incarnation just isn't quite what I'm after.

Hushang Golshiri's The Prince seems to be accounted quite the classic of Persian literature - Golshiri was imprisoned by the Shah and no more popular under the ayatollahs, which always augurs well. Nor have I any criticism of James Buchan's translation, or his introduction (which one critic correctly classifies as "lucid"). The problem is...there's only so far a translation can go. The back cover told me of an ageing prince looking back on his life and his dynasty's extinction, which made me think of Lampedusa's The Leopard; the tone sounded somehow akin to that obscurely poisonous quality in Mishima. These are both writers I've enjoyed in translation, and yes, there are resemblances to both. But the hallucinatory shifts in identity, the portraits unconfined by their frames...these reminded me more of Polanski's Repulsion or Cronenberg's Spider*. Imagine trying to write those out as prose. Now, imagine trying to translate that prose. Oh, and all the characters are obliquely identified historical and political figures about whom your translation's readers are unlikely to know much, if anything. Imagine a Mongolian reading The Damned United, or a member of a remote tribe whose first encounter with Western literature is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, and you will have some handle on my frustration.
The LoEG comparison's an interesting one, because straight after finishing The Prince I read an earlier, simpler Alan Moore - the recoloured 'Killing Joke'**. A book Moore has damn near disowned, purportedly because he doesn't feel it means anything in the wider world - it's just about Batman and the Joker being very similar, and since they don't exist, so what? Well, I'm not so sure about that. It's not his finest hour, for sure - like most of his DCU work bar Swamp Thing it's maybe a little sketchy, a little hurried. But would it mean anything to someone who'd never encountered these characters before? I think maybe it would. A murderous madman says all it needs is "one bad day", and any one of us could end up like him; another madman tries to prove him wrong. That's universal, isn't it? At least as much so, I would contend, as Golshiri's last scion of a deposed dynasty, at once ashamed and envious of his royal ancestors' excesses. Batman and the Joker don't exist - but nowadays, do faded princelings? Only a handful in the gossip columns; for the rest of us, strictly by analogy.

*Yes, I know it was a book first. But still...
**Yes, the new colouring job is much smarter, much more evocative, and simply better. But perhaps not so much so that the book's worth buying again if you already own it. Handily, I didn't, and this was free.

I feel quite exhausted. Danced the (first part of the) night away at SB, until all my energy had burned itself up on getting down to Prince et al. Then out the next day to walk through a London whose summer had come with a vengeance; a mercy that we didn't have too far to travel through her baking streets, both journeys being ones which (in their more direct form) I've done plenty of times before; even getting lost in Gray's Inn couldn't slow us down too much, but lollies were still needed to cool the party down. Lollies which, for some reason, everyone else got through long before I did. Hmmm. Then a brief pause for reflection in the steampunk caverns of the Porterhouse before heading up to PopArt. The Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes is a deeply strange venue; as thedavidx said, it's like a venue from a dream - "I was trying to play a gig and there were all these people bowling, and to get there you had to walk through a cinema and past an American diner..." If only they hadn't run out of the rather yummy cider (or cyder, as it blotted its copybook by describing itself) I could have backed the motion to never leave. The sound's not perfect, but the atmosphere made up for it - and the eighties covers didn't hurt. It came as no surprise that the New Royal Family would attempt Adam Ant, and Lux's 'Manic Monday' tied in with London's current Prince fever, but I was surprised, impressed and terrified by The Low Edges' 'Power of Love'; Huey Lewis as he'd sound covered by his number one fan, Patrick Bateman. Thence to the John Russell, and thence to ruin; I just wish someone had got my comedy side-slide in the Irish pub on camera, I'd have Del Boy falling through the bar beat in no time.

The worst song ever finally finds its natural level.

Having seen This Film Is Not Yet Rated, I appreciate that US film ratings are somewhere between a lottery and a conspiracy, and I have no reason to believe the situation's much better here, but I still find them baffling. This clicked when I realised that Blackadder, on which I pretty much grew up, is rated 15 (except Christmas Carol, which is PG. And that was the one with the loincloth scenes). 15 is also the same rating as seasons 2 and 3 of The Wire (the first season, which I would say is less disturbing than the second at least, is an 18. No idea why). Tim Burton's Batman, which I remember distinctly as the first 12 in cinemas, is 15 on DVD. Yes, obviously people develop at different rates, but even taking that into account I don't think I'm being too idiosyncratic if I say that I think kids can safely see Blackadder a bit younger than Batman, and both of them a long time before they're ready for The Wire.

The Cat Returns is the first non-Miyazaki Ghibli film I've seen (well, as far as I recall - it's quite possible some of the strange anime I half-remember from childhood afternoons was theirs). And this means that for most of the film I'm thinking, well, that was pretty good, but Miyazaki would have done it so much better. The way they move, the faces, nothing is quite in that perfect pitch he almost always manages. The lead has, I suppose, a certain similarity to the girl in his one mis-step, Spirited Away, in that she's far too much the whiny victim compared to Miyazaki's normal protagonists. And the plot...it feels too much like a dream, or an old fable, and these are subtly different forms to film, where the same structures will not suffice.
But by the end, these objections fall away - in part because the film seems to be getting the hang of itself more, but also because its charms are taking effect, and I realise that if it's not Miyazaki, it's still better than almost anyone else.

When I'm objecting to censorship demands made by scum, representatives of the Lost Left like to ask "Ah*, but what if there were a work of art which went against *your* values like that?" And I always say to them, well, there are plenty, none of which I want banned, and some of which are even really good. There are beautiful passages in the King James Bible, for instance (always helps to have Shakespeare on the translation team), and Hero may be a propaganda film for a vile state, but it's also a stunning piece of cinema. The film's message is that China's unity is paramount - there is a subtlety in how characters come to realise this, true, but its nonetheless made explicit that this excuses all manner of deaths and oppressions for the supposed Greater Good. And yet - the point may be vile, but it is never made artlessly. Within the film, it works. That may be a bubble world, a thought experiment which doesn't map on to the real world, but considered as art, it doesn't matter. The Chinese government and military approved of this film enough that it has 18,000 soldiers as extras - but considered as art, the main thing is that given they're playing soldiers (albeit of a much earlier era), this makes for some absolutely stunning massed scenes. And the smaller fights...you know how everyone got excited about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon even though the fight scenes had some really ropy effects? These are the fights those fights dream about being. They're jaw-dropping, they express character perfectly, and above all they are things of utter beauty.
So yes, it's poison. But art can be poison sometimes and still be wonderful.

Hoorah! Grant Morrison's Batman run has resumed! Boo! It's illustrated prose, and illustrated at that by some obviously computer-generated-in-a-really-nineties-way McKean wannabe. There are some great ideas in this tale of how the Joker's periodic self-reinventions work (and they have something to say about the world beyond the Batman and the Joker, which is where Alan Moore always says 'The Killing Joke' failed). But they would all have been much better expressed as, you know, a *comic*. And I've not seen Batman look less threatening since he was being played by George Clooney (who I still think, tragically, could now make a great Batman but will never get a second chance).

*Yes, delivered in the tones of Stewart Lee's Jesus. How did you guess?