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

I've learned my lesson when it comes to talking online about pubs I hope to use regularly (curse you, Neil Morrissey!) but since I'm not in West London very often, I have no hesitation in making this recommendation to those who are. The Pelican, near Portobello Road, loses points for a lack of draught cider, but since all the drinks seem to be the same price anyway, I object less to Bulmers. Good decor, properly twilit like an old-style pub but not scuzzy. Not bad music, except for the reggae. But here's the clincher - Thursday, from 6pm to 9pm, you order your drinks and then roll two dice. The bar also rolls two dice. You roll higher - your drinks are free. You don't - you just pay what you would have anyway. Obviously the gamer in me thinks that this lacks nuance - double 6 should be a critical hit, where you also get champagne, while on a double 1 you have critically failed, pay double and get punched in the face. But hey, it's their business. And I did see three double 1s rolled by punters, once twice by the same guy, so I can see how that might lose custom.
Portobello Road, though - that was one of the first London locations etched in my mind ("street where the riches of ages are sold"), and it looks to be dying on its arse. Half the shops are shut and look like that's long-term, and the rest were short on customers. Really took me aback. As did the 'coming attractions' signboard still up on the Astoria, and the realisation that Don Draper is only 35. Meaning that in the first series of Mad Men, set 18 months earlier, he was presumably 33. He can't only be two years older than me, he's a grown-up!

The first issue of Neil Gaiman's Batman story...maybe it was just because I read it drunk, but I have no idea where he's going with this. It is nonetheless brilliant, and coming so hot on the heels of Grant Morrison's third definitive take on the character, that's impressive. In other comics news, Kieron Gillen's Sabretooth one-shot is probably not essential reading for all Phonogram fans, but is pretty good, and the new issue of Captain Britain has DRACULA MEETING DOCTOR DOOM ON THE MOON. I love comics.

I'm surprised more hasn't been made of Mick Harvey leaving the Bad Seeds. Mick's been working with Nick since The Boys Next Door, and I've always wondered how much of what we think of as Cave is in fact Harvey, particularly when listening to Harvey's other projects. I suppose now we get to find out.

Final Crisis: Superman Beyond's second issue confirms that this is the comic Final Crisis should have been. Yes, Grant Morrison is reusing his old tropes again - breaking the fourth wall, Limbo, the self-evolving hyperstory, creators trapped in creation - but here there's a manic, fizzing joy and ingenuity I'm not getting from the parent Rock of Ages reprise. Some great 3D sequences, too - though should you happen, as I did, to look out of the window with your glasses still on, it brings a real moment of Crisis terror - RED SKIES!
Elsewhere in comics, Bendis' Dark Avengers may not have any lines to equal the best of Warren Ellis' Thunderbolts run, but in so far as it's taking that series' concept - Marvel's biggest bastards given the keys to the kingdom - to the next level, I'm very much interested. Thunderbolts, meanwhile, has gone deeper and darker under Andy Diggle, and this issue includes a considerably more substantial Barack Obama appearance than that meaningless fluff-piece of a Spider-Man back-up strip, albeit to considerably less fanfare.

Have been left with a nagging sensation that I've not used my leisure to best advantage this week, to the extent that I started getting quite angry with myself/the world and had to go wander the British Museum for a while to calm down. Silly, really - even aside from the nebulous business of Seeing Nice People, I've watched another Losey/Pinter/Bogarde masterpiece, Accident; seen the Soft Close-Ups and Mr Solo; and made a reasonably good start on Ulysses, so it's not as if I'm flicking myself off to Trisha just yet.

I know list articles are intrinsically pointless, and I know they're designed to provoke quibbling, so I'm not going to get up in arms about the omissions from the Guardian's Novels You Must Read, or the times where they've chosen a book which isn't the author's best. And I should be glad, I suppose, that one of the seven sections was science fiction and fantasy. But since when was Kavalier & Clay, The Man Who Was Thursday or The Wasp Factory science fiction or fantasy? They may not be dull enough to be literary fiction, but none of them takes place in a world that is not the consensus version of this one - except in so far as they are not true. If we say that the fictional comics in Chabon's book make it an alternate world, then so does the fictional MP in The Line of Beauty, and down that line every book bar the most tiresomely domestic becomes SF. Which would amuse me at least a little, it's true, but is patently nonsense.

So, in a clear effort to confound the suggestion that Final Crisis is just a bloated and less compelling rewrite of his own JLA: Rock of Ages, it was nice to see Grant Morrison ( spoilers ) Really - he's better than this, and he must know that.
Also in comics this week (and last, I missed a pick-up):
- delightful Anglophile teen comedy Blue Monday finally returns! Hoorah!
- Warren Ellis makes an ill-advised attempt to tie Doktor Sleepless to Freakangels!
- Pete Wisdom kills furries!

The Natural History museum is far too interactive and accessible nowadays. If I want a moving, roaring dinosaur, I shall go to a theme park, and for all that I respect Zoids and Grimlock, they do not belong in the dinosaur room of a major museum.
The glyptodon (it's an armadillo the size of a small car!), the strokeable meteoric iron and some of the loopier gem formations are still lovely, though.

Since I made it back from Devon and a resurgent cold it's been a delightful haze of parties and pubs (and thank you all for a lovely birthday, it made entering the rather characterless age of 31 a pleasure rather than a puzzle). I love these inbetween days - one of my presents was Intermission, a compilation of solo Go-Betweens tracks from the period of their split, and as well as being lovely anyway, the name and the cold sun outside make it a good fit for right now.

My reservations about that BBC4 series on fantasy have been strengthened now that I've made a start on ER Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, a book to which The Lord of the Rings was compared at its launch. It's at once recognisable as part of the same tradition, and a bizarre vision of an alternate track fantasy could have taken. Not so much in the style - although it makes Tolkien look like a dirty realist at times* - as in how it lays out the toolbox. Eddison does much what Tolkien did to people Middle Earth - he takes the names of spirits from folklore, and then ascribes them to human-like races in his imagined world. But after sixty years of Tolkien-derived fantasy, we're used to elves and dwarves and goblins. Eddison, on the other hand, calls his races witches and demons and imps, and from those names we don't expect solid, human-like races, even if the demons do make the concession of having little horns. There are also the foliots, whose name baffled me entirely until I then also started the deranged encyclopaedia that is The Anatomy of Melancholy and learned accidentally and almost at once that they are visitors to forlorn houses who make strange noises in the night. Except here they're not, they're a rather sappy bunch who live on an island and remind me faintly of the Dutch.

Have fulfilled the first of my definite plans for the life of leisure, with a one-sitting reread of All-Star Superman. Which is at times even more perfect than I remember - I especially like how fractal it gets, with lines like "I always write the Superman headlines before they happen" encompassing the whole - but I remain uncomfortably certain that the Bizarro story didn't need to cover two issues.

Finally got round to seeing The Last King of Scotland, and while I was almost as impressed as I expected to be - the central performances are stunning, Forrest Whitaker possibly even excelling his turn in The Shield (whose first series is a tenner on DVD in the HMV sale, and strongly recommended to anyone feeling a Wire-shaped gap in their viewing) - the ending left a little of a nasty taste in my mouth. Clearly the film is massively engaged with the idea of white exceptionalism, but it still seemed to fall slightly into it at the last.

*'"I like not the dirty face of the Ambassador," said Lord Zigg. "His nose sitteth flat on the face of him as it were a dab of clay, and I can see pat up his nostrils a summer day's journey into his head. If's upper lip bespeak him not a rare spouter of rank fustian, perdition catch me. Were it a finger's breadth longer, a might tuck it into his collar to keep his chin warm of a winter's night."
"I like not the smell of the Ambassador," said Lord Brandoch Daha. And he called for censers and sprinklers of lavender and rose water to purify the chamber, and let open the crystal windows that the breezes of heaven might enter and make all sweet.'

Miserable bloody day out there, isn't it? Although it's stretching it to call it a day at all when it's this blank - it's more like a gap of non-time. I would call it archetypally Sundayish had yesterday not been cut from the same cloth - although yesterday I probably exacerbated matters by braving the bad bits of Ealing. There are some lovely pubs down the Broadway end, and of course the studios which gave us Ealing comedy, but at the other end of town it's an Ealing tragedy, whether the desolation of Gunnersbury Park or Tudor Row, which true to its name is the most soul-sappingly mock Tudor street I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. I'm going to have to leave the house at some point today, but I'm putting it off for as long as possible. Thank heavens for a four-week comics backlog to keep me entertained (on days like this, comics somehow do a better job than prose of lifting the spirits - I would say that maybe it's just all that colour, except that the black-and-white Wasteland seemed to work just as well). Still can't believe that Batman RIP got mainstream press coverage, though - not that I'm dissing Brubaker's Death of Captain America storyline, but that was pretty much what it said on the tin - a story about Cap's death, a story which can be taken as a political comment on our times. Whereas Batman RIP is Morrison musing on Batman through the traditional Morrison obsessions of identity, Eastern mysticism, order and chaos - or alternately, musing on them using Batman as a tool. It's a good read, but it's not going to convert anyone to comics (except maybe a confirmed psychonaut), and I pity any journos hoping to get an op ed out of it.

...which title I pick not just because the song's been stuck in my head since Saturday's Prom Night, but because the first issue of Grant Morrison's 'Superman Beyond 3D' is the comic I was hoping and expecting Final Crisis would be. Only in one spread does the 3D effect have quite the same mind-twisting force as it did in the Blazing World scenes of Alan Moore's Black Dossier, but even if for the rest of the issue it's just a gimmick then hey, 3D is a pretty cool gimmick. And this...this is what I want from a Grant Morrison Event. Dead worlds! Limbo! Dr Manhattan with the serial numbers filed off! Cross-time lunacy and alternate heroes and giant crashing spaceships and only Superman left to save the day. It's as if Levitzseid has got Grant enchained at the heart of his monstrous engine of destruction, perverting his mighty Morrison powers in the furtherance of DC's Anti-Fun Equation...but Grant's too good to go down without a fight, and so by some ludicrous contrivance freed an aspect of himself to write a good Final Crisis comic.
The second best comic of last week, incidentally, was the conclusion to Book One of Warren Ellis' Doktor Sleepless. Just when I was worried we were getting a Planetary-style loss of focus, it turns out that the mysticism and the techno-evangelism have a perfectly sensible reason for being in the same book. I think we were perhaps meant to come away from the book with the idea that Doktor Sleepless is not the hero after all; personally, I'm backing him all the way.

Speaking of mad science: never mind the cure for cancer - isn't unlocking telomere structure the first step on the road to immortality in the Fall Revolution books?

Finally got round to watching Brokeback Mountain on Sunday - yes, I know, I fail at gay. I was a bit puzzled at first; I was expecting it to be one of those manly American buddy movies where you're thinking guys, just bone already - except then they do. But whether this was intended or not, I really didn't feel any chemistry off them until it happened. Which worked, I think. As did the scenery, obviously; I'm sure if that hadn't been so beautifully, expansively shot then the film would never have been able to cross over to the extent that it did. I wasn't convinced by the flashbacks - I thought they upset a flow which was otherwise brilliantly established - but otherwise, it's just such a well-judged film. Details which don't sit right at first (are the women being deliberately established as deadening forces, in the manner beloved of misogynist homosexuals?) come clear in time: it's not that the women are dead hands, it's that society is. A homophobic rural society especially, but not exclusively; even if Jack and Ennis had settled down somewhere nice and friendly just outside San Francisco, the mere fact of domesticity would mean what they had couldn't stay as pure as it was when it was born up on Brokeback Mountain.
(For another consideration of how uneasily passion sits in a mundane world, consider My Zinc Bed, which features excellent performances from Jonathan Pryce and Paddy Considine, and a rather strange accent from Uma Thurman. Of course, neither of these made me cry a fraction as much as Kiki's Delivery Service; I already know how malformed this world is, it's seeing the contrast of what a decent one would be like which breaks me down)

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.

'Silence in the Library' was a Moffat Who story, so obviously it was brilliant. Yes, in some ways he's repeating himself, but so what? They're good tropes. Give them another airing. ( Spoilers! )

When the last night of drinking on the Tube was announced as a possible Event by an associate, I was keen, not least because it intended a keynote of civility. Not even as a protest per se (I see the ban as a regrettable necessity - one of those blunt instrument laws like the age of consent which undoubtedly leads to injustices, but which remains a least worst option while we have neither the social nor technological maturity to enjoin and enforce what should be the one immutable law: Don't Be A Dick). But once other people had the same idea - people for whose character I could not vouch, and whose agendas were not quite the same - I paused. And once it was on the front of both freesheets, that was me out: carnage was inevitable and I didn't want to end up as part of the statistics proving the wrong point. So when I went into town in the afternoon, I had a tot of absinthe* from my hipflask on the bus in, another on the Piccadilly Line home, and said my own quiet farewell. With the bonus that I realised it was so discreet, it could probably still be managed post-ban.

For reasons I can't entirely explain, my usual practice is to build up a big list of potentially interesting acts to check out on Myspace, and then go through them en masse. Maybe it's like heats, to limit how many will get chance to win me over? So anyway, I had one of these runs and lots of them, as usual, were weak. The best thing was probably a rather epic, Iain Sinclair-style new Madness track, but by now you should all know whether or not you like Madness (though if you don't, you've maybe just not heard the right bits). That aside, the highlight was 'Stuck on Repeat' by Little Boots. Which I ought to find as generic as I do much modern electropop by hot girls (this one's ex-Dead Disco), yet somehow I don't. Maybe I'm giving her a pass for naming herself after Caligula? Maybe Hot Chip production helped? Maybe sometimes a song just stands out from its crowd.
(Best Myspace, though, was the new Swimmer One side project. The music did nothing for me, but I love the bio and the name: Sparklegash.

A Grant Morrison first issue is usually a big deal. The first Seven Sisters I read on a bus, spellbound, then went right back to the beginning and started all over again. The first All-Star Superman, I think that was three times. The first Final Crisis I read, shrugged, then read New Avengers 41 which is hardly the best Secret Invasion issue yet, but still made more impression on me. Then nipped in to the British Museum to reacquaint myself with the gods**, then came home reading the penultimate Dan Dare (real Single Manly Tear stuff) and the first issue of Millar's 1985, which is exactly the sort of supers-invade-our-poor-heroless-world stuff Morrison usually does so well. ( Those Final Crisis complaints in spoilerific detail ) It could yet improve. I really hope it does.
Grant's latest Batman issue, on the other hand, is brilliant.

France really doesn't make them like this anymore, does it? Why not?

*It was the only hipflask-suitable drink I had in the house. But beyond that, it seemed apt.
**I never formally decided, even to myself, that I wasn't going in while the terracotta army was there. I just somehow never found myself wanting to go in there during that period of time, and I don't really believe in coincidence.

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 used to respect Tom Hodgkinson; once the Idler was the best magazine going, and How To Be Idle remains (for the most part) a valuable work of political philosophy mis-filed as humour. Alas, of late he has become one of the tinfoil hat brigade, retailing tired cliches about mobile 'phones as enslavers and the like. And he really doesn't like Facebook. Shockingly, a major company has shareholders who are a bit right-wing! Not homophobes or religious nuts like run half the public transport in Britain, mind - but a utopian who's all in favour of life-extension and the Singularity. Which is a bad thing, apparently. No, don't ask me how. Oh, and apparently it's really, like Big Brother, man! that Facebook's privacy policy says "You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of user content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other users have copied or stored your user content." Because obviously if Facebook kept a record of anyone who'd ctrlC'd any of your content, and deleted that when you deleted the original, that would be in no way Big Brother-esque, would it?
Tosser.

ITV are really going for the big push, aren't they? OK, so their best show, Entourage, shows no sign of returning from its baffling mid-season hiatus, but that's an import. Their best home-grown, and the best thing they have on terrestrial, is Primeval, which restarted on Saturday. Kingdom is probably the weakest Stephen Fry offering in some time, but it's still Stephen Fry and thus better than almost anything on ITV; that came back Sunday. Royal dramedy The Palace looks like it might be half-decent, but it's scheduled opposite City of Vice (Henry Fielding fights crime - WITH WIGS!), so I shall probably never know. Oh, and there was Moving Wallpaper, wasn't there? That should have been good. I loved the idea of making a new soap, and then having a sitcom set behind the scenes of the soap, even before I knew Ben Miller was starring in it. They've also got a couple of Absolute Power alumni, and therein lies their problem - media in-jokes only appeal to a niche audience, and Absolute Power does them much better, even in the episodes written by Smug Slug*. The show has been infected with that terrible ITVitis (the disease which atrophies human acting and scripting ability even in the gifted). On top of which, they've absolutely blown it by showing Moving Wallpaper right before the soap whose production it shows/undermines, on the same channel. Echo Beach belongs on ITV1, channel of choice for the undiscriminating cudlip. The sly dig at it should not be interfering with their evening of cathode ray grazing - it should be tucked away on ITV2. Same slot, so people who want the pair reflecting on each other can still have the experience - but you should have to work for it, if only in the sense of changing channel.
Not that ITV are the only people launching inept sitcoms, of course. Consider Never Better on C4, with Guy from Green Wing once again playing a less amusing variation on the same character. But for heavens' sake don't consider it for very long, life is short and there is so much better stuff you could be watching. Or indeed, appearing in; his Green Wing brother Martin has been openly retconned into Primeval, which somehow evades ITVitis and continues to kick arse. Motorbike chases with velociraptors in a shopping centre? 'Sound of Thunder' time travel messes used to mess with the lead's head *and* sex up the set-up? Hannah S Club with a gun? I'm sold.

Have been listening to A Cellarful of Motown volume 3 a fair bit lately. It's volume 3 of a label rarities compilation and it doesn't have a single dud on it; how many labels can say that, and how many volumes would it take Motown before they started scraping the barrel? Which is not to say I love them all equally - 'Uptight' aside I never really got Stevie Wonder, and Carolyn Crawford's 'Too Young Too Long' is a bit reminiscent of the song at the end of Brass Eye's Paedogeddon - but not one track sucks. I find myself especially drawn to 'Loving You (Is Hurting Me)' but that may just be because it's credited to the Fantastic Four, so I picture it soundtracking another of those painful Reed/Sue/Namor love triangle scenes.

An interesting if grouchy piece on Marvel and DC notes that both companies, as corporate entities, place a vanishingly small amount of their emphasis on the ongoing publication of comics (against which, part of me is thrilled to see DC describe itself as the home of "such popular characters as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and The Sandman". Gaiman's boy in with the Trinity already...). And the scorn directed at the concept of an Ant-Man film is definitely misplaced when you recall that Edgar Wright has been named in connection with the project. But this ties in with something I was thinking about before christmas, except I see it as cause for rejoicing if only the message could be filtered up the line. To wit:
It doesn't matter what happens in the comics.
Corporate superhero properties have, as a rule, been reined in by a fear of hurting the brand. The theory goes that if little Tommy sees the new Batman film, and he then picks up a Batman comic at the drugstore/newsagent, it should to some degree tally with what he saw on screen. So Batman has to be Bruce Wayne (this has already nixed one of Grant Morrison's rumoured plans for the forthcoming Final Crisis).
Except drugstores and newsagents don't carry comics anymore, or if they do it's one of the reprint titles with 'classic' material. So it doesn't matter what's happening in the comics in the comic shops. Because if little Tommy goes in there, the retailer would be a mug to sell him the latest issue of the monthly. Give him one of the trades of the classics. If he says 'goddamn' a lot, give him All-Star Batman. If he's blatantly a goth, Arkham Asylum. I'm hard-pressed to think exactly what sort of little Tommy you'd need to think that giving him the monthly would be a remotely wise idea. So in the monthly, just let Grant Morrison do whatever the Hell the little voices are telling him, and everyone's happy!

Live Free Or Die Hard (fvck the UK title) is basically the same plot as Die Hard With A Vengeance + The Interweb, isn't it? Not that I'm complaining. And Die Harder is a great film overall, but definitely has the least compelling villain.

*He tries to pass for human by the name 'Mark Lawson', but does it really fool anyone?