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

A quiet weekend there, especially yesterday when I barely left my room, and didn't even click until afterwards how suited that was to an afternoon of gaol-based viewing. Having finished off the second half of Oz season 2* I settled in with my Guardian freebie disc of Kiss Of The Spider Woman. I'd always wondered why William Hurt kept getting acting roles when he manifestly wasn't able to act; I knew he had an Oscar but I assumed it must have been a precursor to Halle Berry's - perhaps people made of wood were the Academy's desired tokenistas that year and Pinocchio didn't have a film out? Turns out I had him wrong - he's more a Vin Diesel, a man who acted extremely well, once and then realised he didn't need to bother, he'd still get paid. But let's not allow his subsequent decline to sully that one magnificent performance. Let's pretend that he died like James Dean, maybe even got the Oscar posthumously...what a star! What a performance, what a film, what an opposite number in Raul 'Gomez Addams' Julia! I'm not even sure what I took away from the film - something beyond its slowly reconciled opposition between dreams and revolution, for sure, but something somehow formless and at once poetic yet inexpressible. A film about films that don't exist, from which I take away a message I can't verbalise - apt, I suppose.

I wouldn't like it thought that I won't give credit where it's due on those rare occasions when something good comes out of christianity. this computer game, for instance. Or, more timelessly, GK Chesterton. I've read his poetry and fiction before, and been very impressed by the quality of his mind and the facility with language which models it so well upon the page. Orthodoxy is the first I've read of his essays, and even if I don't agree with his ultimate agenda, every page has gems of phrasing and logic:
"Shakespeare is quite himself; it only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else."
"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
And so forth. I must always concede that he at least presents a case to answer, which is more than can be said for most thinkers. Ultimately, I think he and I could rally together behind Planetary's slogan: It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way. He wants a mystery and a grandeur to life, but also a welcome; if we would both guarantee those inalienable rights by reference to different gods, well, heavens know it's a lot closer than I feel to most of my nominal co-religionists.

NME Hack Throws Ill-Informed Strop is not, in and of itself, newsworthy. When features editor James McMahon grunts that "Today's Observer Music Monthly feature on 'the new eccentrics' has left me dizzy, shaken and above all furious at what my beloved rock music has become. For one thing it was seemingly written by an idiot whose politics and ideology have been formed by books rather than life experiences and emotional toil"...well, that's just the sort of wilful ignorance one expects from the strand of music journalism which loves illiterate oiks for their own sake, and that was ever with us (it was the Stud Brothers who epitomised it back when I followed the Melody Maker, but Garry Bushell's probably the most famous exponent). What interests me is that among the acts which this apparently appalling document of prole-hate champion are...Foals and Lightspeed Champion. Both acts which the NME cannot currently do enough to rim.
Also from the Department of Huh?: the shooting component of the accursed Olympics is to be held in Woolwich. The games are taking place primarily in East London. And what part of London goes more iconically with 'shooting' than 'Hackney'? OK, maybe Peckham or Brixton should also be in with a shot, but Woolwich? OK, it has the Arsenal, but a better way to honour that would be to move Arsenal back there (probably in the first hundred Things I Would Do If Super-Rich, that). Then again, we are talking about sportists here, so probably shouldn't expect too much evidence of brainpower.

Are Tube announcers going to keep mentioning the East London Line closure for the next 2 1/2 years (plus however much longer it takes in reality)? Because if so, it's going to get very boring.

*Not quite the first season's equal, I think, perhaps because Tom Fontana was only co-scripting many episodes. A few of the plotlines feel a little forced, harbingers of the whole 'ageing drug' fiasco when s4 was overstretched. But certainly there is still much to love and more to be impressed by. And less of Poet's Speech Painter-style performance poetry, which has to be a bonus.

Of possible interest to some of you: new Gang Of Four demos free online.

You wait ages for a Neil Gaiman film, and then two come across at once. Beowulf didn't have me blubbing sentimentally like Stardust did, but in its way it's sadder. And it doesn't have so many comedians in it, but it's just as funny, in its own bleak way. In tone, if not style, it betrays Gaiman's debt to James Branch Cabell - to Cabell's fascination with the flaws and the humanity and the lies behind any heroic myth, his fear that even when you accomplish your goals, "Nothing was as good as it should have been". But with Cabell, Gaiman recognises that mere slash-and-burn demythologisation is easy, and as false as the shiny, superficial account. "It is solely by believing himself but a little below the seraphim that man has become, on the whole, distinctly preferable to the chimpanzee", said Cabell (I may paraphrase slightly) - similarly, Gaiman knows that because a hero is a bullsh1tter, doesn't mean he's not also a hero. Granted, it is very hard to take this line without seeming by extension to justify every grubby lie and manipulation perpetrated in the name of leadership image and 'the greater good' - but intuitively, if not in a way I can quite verbalise, I know the difference, even if I can also see how people lose sight of it.
It is a very faithful adaptation, in its way - it assumes the poem to be a historical record, notes how historical records can distort the facts, and reads backwards. If you want that with more spoilers, try here; for particular clarity on Angelina Jolie's (excellent) take on Grendel's mother, there's a phrase here which I'd quote if it didn't give far too much away. Of course, I usually like Angelina, especially in femme fatale roles - the surprise was that I thought Ray Winstone perfectly cast. I've never thought that before, but never before has he played the last of the barbarian heroes, a man who knows he may have more in common with the monsters he slays than with those who come after him. It helps too that the motion-capture technology makes him considerably less offensive to the eye, yet at the same time plausible - which is odd given it makes the Queen look like she's made of putty.
(Coincidentally, my current bag book is the unfortunately-titled Black Man, which is also fascinated by the idea of the hyper-male warrior, who fights society's battles, but whom that society also regards as kin to monsters. I thought about trying to pull Grosse Point Blank in here too, because I saw that while Ill and it also concerns the melancholy of the killer's life, but for all that John Cusack is superhott in it, I don't think you could call him hyper-male)

Department Of Offended People Missing The Point: posters for the sly and satirical Shoot 'Em Up have been censured for glamorizing violence. Clearly these people haven't twigged that the poster of the prick from Sideways with a gun captioned "Just another family man making a living" is *meant* to offend - to point up the moral blindness of all those whose jobs make the world a worse place.
And when it comes to slapping down Ronan Bennett's "clumsy tirade" against Martin Amis, well, I think I shall just hand over to the ever-clearsighted Christopher Hitchens to enumerate Ronan the Accuser's muddles and slurs and sheer foolishness.

The Bacchae opens with Alan Cumming's arse descending from the heavens, upside down. And a very nice arse it is too, so fair enough. All these centuries on, Greek tragedies are a damned hard thing to get right; if you've never seen a cod-Shakespearean translation staged with dusty solemnity by an am dram shambles, then count yourself lucky. You need to balance the stage as the distant place in which the story unfolds, and the stage as the platform from which a speaker interacts with the audience. You need to balance the alien with the intimate, and only an incredibly rare director will be able to do both sides full justice. So maybe this production doesn't quite capture the strangeness and the terror - the music for the Bacchae's chants would need to be catchier for that, and just generally *more* - but it has the intimacy, the immediacy. And that's all down to Cumming, and the masterstroke of playing Dionysus as a pantomime character. Or two, perhaps - he's a hybrid of the Dame and the Principal Boy. I suppose he's the father of carnival, isn't he? So they're both his children, no wonder if we should think he resembles them both when really it's the other way around. And at times the staging catches glimpses of his power - you can feel the flames which burn Thebes, and the light when he appears in all his pomp is genuinely dazzling.
Translator David Greig has his tone about right (I particularly like his use of 'The Scream' rather than 'The Roarer' as one of the god's names). It's a long time since I read the play, but I don't recall it being quite so one-sided when I did - or rather, I knew that *I* was entirely on Dionysus' side, but I thought that was as much me as the text. Now...well, as Greig says, "There are still men who would control women in order to bolster their shaky sense of self. There are still men who are lost because they refuse to lose themselves in dance." He could add that some such men are also obsessed with male pride, and absolutely petrified of alcohol and 'corrupting influences' of the wider society, just like Pentheus. So for all that I liked Pentheus as the no-nonsense Scot unaware what a nonsense it is to resist Dionysus, I think the times and the translation would have been better served by dressing him as an imam.
My biggest problem with the play, though, is one I'm sure was in the text, but which I never really noticed, because when you're reading a play, you can...if not skim the bits you don't enjoy, then at least read them faster. Staged in front of you, there's no fast forward. Once Pentheus gets his come-uppance, once the others who slighted Dionysus and his mother get their just desserts, they don't half spend a while wailing about it. Look - I don't care. You were idiots. You had warnings, and still you stood against a god - and not just any god, but an incredibly cool god. Now you have been destroyed, as puny humans will be in such circumstances. And you were miserable sods, so I'm glad. Where's the tragedy? This isn't Shakespeare, or even Sophocles, where people are trapped impossibly between contradictory imperatives which must all be honoured. This is more like the end of The Wicker Man - ie, party time.

Speaking of puny humans, a marvellous quote I keep forgetting to post:
"At moments like this I hate being an unreconstructed human - an island of thinking jelly trapped in a bony carapace, endless miliseconds away from its lovers, forced to squeeze every meaning through a low-bandwidth speech channel. All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night."
- Charles Stross, Glasshouse. The speaker is a future human used to being able to swap bodies quicker than we'd swap outfits, confined by lunatics to a normal human body in a re-creation of the 1950-2050 Dark Age.

Prince Philip worshipped as god in Vanuatu.

I'm feeling like a bit of a grinch for only giving 'Blink' 8/10 over on diggerdydum; clearly it was excellent, it just wasn't quite at the same exalted heights as Moffat's last three episodes, or the last two episodes of this series (like which, it was adapted from a previous prose Who piece of the author's, albeit this time one which will have been read by tinies as well as geeks). I love it when Who actually does time travel stories. And the science here may have been nonsense, but it was nonsense in that 'sounds *almost* right' sense, and that (unlike all the DNA bobbins earlier) is fine by me. A lot of people seem not to have been too keen on the ending, missing the point that it wasn't really anything to do with the plot - it was just about giving children nightmares. And really, what higher endeavour is there?

Black.Plastic = top fun. And how refreshing to hear so much music I like being played in the Pleasure Unit without actually having to worry. I think the pop/electro/goth/indie mix they've hit on really does sound like it works together, which is always the tough bit for any night operating outside the usual genre alliances.
(Weird taking the 254 through Stamford Hill for the first time since reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union, finding myself thinking 'black hatters' and generally in Yiddish about the ultra-Orthodoxes thronging the streets)

"A public service TV channel launched by President Hugo Chávez...Televisora Venezolana Social, (TVes), has a mandate to wean Venezuelans off western-style capitalist consumerism with programmes that promote the government's leftwing agenda. But since its launch on May 28 the channel has shown American films, dubbed into Spanish, which have not been screened since Richard Nixon occupied the White House. It has also aired French cartoons, Brazilian puppet shows, Argentinian soaps and Soviet films. A Miami-based production company, Wide Angle Productions, has said that several of its shows were screened without permission or payment. Venezuelan filmmakers said they were being asked to supply content at bargain prices.
Thursday's programming included European cartoons, an exercise show fronted by a blonde kickboxer, government adverts promoting education, a three-hour speech by the president and Bambi's Youth, a 1986 USSR allegory in which humans play the role of deers."

Reminder: history walk starting at the Dairy at 2, Stokefest in Clissold Park later. Non-Local types are excused non-attendance. Though not being Local in the first place will still need a good defence.

As much as I love PG Wodehouse, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, I feel eight episodes of Jeeves & Wooster in one sitting was perhaps mildly excessive. It's not normally a problem keeping Wodehouse's characters straight, since they all fit a fairly limited number of types, but when you go through so many stories at once - and several key characters change actor halfway through - it does get a bit much.
Good pie, though.

What kind of excuse for a world do we live in where a man can be struck by lightning in a stone circle and all it does is cripple him? What's worse, the poor sap, having failed to realise the full horrific potential of this parallel, now says "The experience hasn't left me with a fear of lightning; in fact, I feel invincible now. The chances of being struck are millions to one - and I do believe lightning doesn't strike twice." He's obviously unaware of the park ranger who's now been struck seven times.

Ah, there's a long weekend ahead and that always feels good. Starting in an hour or so with a nineties nostalgia night, which I imagine will be agreeably odd. Easter - the fertility festival where the monotheists didn't even bother to change the name. And as a weekend, it does always feel like it's pregnant with possibility.

"I think we should cancel the word genre, I think we should throw the word genre out. We are not a genre, which suggests a small or perhaps even somewhat besieged condition - we are a continent and, actually most of the smaller things which came along afterwards like naturalism, realism, these things are a mere 200 years old, to pick up Ramsey's word, they are striplings. How long has naturalistic fiction been around – maybe 300 years?"
Well said, Clive Barker.
A less happy quote comes from the great Phil Spector: "[Women] all deserve to die. They all deserve a bullet in their fvcking head". This trial isn't going to go well for him, is it?

Though I've taken a brief break from Neal Stephenson's The System of the World, it's fun to see one of its subplots cropping up in the news - namely, the Russian Academy of Sciences, of whose foundation by Peter the Great the book contains a fictionalised account.
Except that in keeping with the usual "The Enlightenment - nice while it lasted" tone of events these days, it's in the news because Putin wants to subject it to a degree of central government control it didn't suffer even in Soviet days.
Sigh.

Mainly at the urging of the Voiceless One, I've had another attempt at zombie comic The Walking Dead. The first collection had been OK, but nothing I really needed in my life - then again, I'm not that big on zombie films either (with Shaun of the Dead as with Hot Fuzz I was watching more for the Pegg and Wright than the ostensible genre). But persevering - wow. It helps that Charlie Adlard took over the art after the first few issues, his hard-bitten faces and general grit being a perfect fit for the mood Kirkman's trying to create.
But what really makes it is simply that it goes on. There's no end, no sign of the Army turning up, no cure, not even the end credits of a film. The zombie apocalypse isn't wrapped up tidily, and the surviving humans have to keep on struggling and dying and killing and losing everything that made their lives worth living. I realised it at a book ahead of the characters, and still felt slow - it's not just the zombies who are the walking dead. It's the zombie Oz, basically.