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

Every so often, I flick back through my Livejournal to see what I was doing on this day ago. So this weekend, I found that it was a year since I'd last been on a doomed expedition to find anything of artistic worth in the Hayward Gallery, before dawdling along the rest of the South Bank instead. This time, the things which actually gave me the shock to which modern art aspires were a robot wrapped in plastic in the BFI corridor, and seeing the huge doors on the side of the Turbine Hall open for the first time - though we did get some laughs from Joan Miro's muff obsession.
It's also a year since I saw the Indelicates launch the album of 2008, American Demo. And now they're back with some new stuff mixed in to the set - 'The Recession Song' has already been doing the rounds, ditto Simon's 'David Koresh Superstar' side-project (but what a perfect source for a song to spice up the Easter set). But the new song proper, 'Savages'...oh, it's lovely. More 'New Art For The People' or '...if Jeff Buckely had Lived' than 'We Hate The Kids', more beauty than bile (but with plenty of bitterness still because this is, after all, an Indelicates song).
Their Cargo show on Tuesday is a Club Attitude event, intended to encourage disabled people to attend gigs. Whether incapacity benefits would cover Cargo drinks prices is another question, but the photographer whizzing around in a pimped wheelchair is pretty swish, and the sign language guy...I'm used to sign language guys being expressionless berks in red sweaters who obscure a quarter of the screen when I'm trying to watch a late-night film, and who just make me think 'What's wrong with subtitles?' This man feels like part of the band from the start, getting into it, really conveying the spirit of the music as well as the words. He is an artist. Plus, he looks like Ming the Merciless crossed with moleintheground, so watching him sign "but for the come in your hair" was always going to be classic.
No signer on Saturday, but there is Mr Solo, in a more conventional gig format than I usually see him, and as such, with an audience who seemed less appreciative. I think they must have been the peons there en masse for the other band, whose name happily escapes me.

Between my own sluggish attempts at getting up after the Bank Holiday excesses, and the dearth of Uxbridge trains, it was apparent to me yesterday that I was going to be late enough for the Tubewalk that I couldn't in all conscience ask everyone to wait for me - I decided instead to trust to synchronicity, and set off on my own walk in the rough direction of Rayner's Lane. Which didn't bring me to the expeditionary force, but did find me a wonderful little streamside park, and a house so tumbledown and overgrown that rather than thinking 'slatterns' it makes you think 'Sleeping Beauty in Pinner', and a very confused mouse lost on a main road.

Dear Gordon - I know you're a bit busy at the moment on account of your aides being a shower of arses who can't even run a smear campaign without tripping over themselves, but you should still be aware that there is, by definition, no such thing as a 'compulsory volunteer'. Such work is not 'voluntary', it is simply 'unpaid'. And mandatory unpaid work is called 'slavery'.
(ETA: This article has been tidied up since it was first posted, and now uses 'voluntary' considerably less than it did. But it still uses it, so the point still stands)
Another great move by the party of labour there - getting back to the old socialist roots with work camps, while simultaneously depressing the job market by providing a free alternative!
Though arguably the whole issue is academic, given it hinges on Brown winning the next election.

Margaret Drabble, in a piece about coping with depression, wisely recommends walking. But more interestingly, she also mentions "I've met only one writer who frankly admits that if it hadn't been for the drink, he'd have committed suicide long ago. Nobody would publish his book on alcohol as life-saver, because everyone is keen to toe the safer party line that it's really a depressant." I'd like to read that book, if anyone fancies running the neo-Puritan blockade. Bet it would have been all over the place if Wee Charlie Kennedy were PM.

David Devant have new material! And Brontosaurus Chorus do too, but that doesn't come as quite such a surprise, them not having been however many years now without any. Still, let joy be unconfined! Anyway, it's that time of year, isn't it? The NME have printed their predictably predictable list, so I might as well tell you what were really the ( Albums of the Year, 2008 )

As for singles - or I suppose we should just say 'tracks' nowadays...it wasn't a bad year, but there was no Song Of The Year, was there? By which I mean something both brilliant and ubiquitous, an 'Umbrella' or 'Get Ur Freak On' or 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head'. 'Wearing My Rolex' felt like it could be that song, but it was too early and didn't hang around like it ought to have done, ditto 'Ready For The Floor' (in spite of that brilliant proto-Dark Knight video) and Hercules & Love Affair's 'Blind'. MGMT's 'Time To Pretend' and Black Kids' 'I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You'...too hipster to win over the world, perhaps? Both wonderful, though. I think the song which'll probably take me right back to 2008 in years to come is 'I.W.I.S.H.I.W.A.S.Gay'; alas, if it does conquer the rest of the world, it's not going to be 'til next year now.

Best book title I've seen recently: Building Confidence - For Dummies.

There have been some really good clouds this week, haven't there?

I only had a three day work week, and over the last two nights I've seen two of my very favourite bands, The Indelicates, and David Devant & his Spirit Wife. I have rambled ecstatically about both of them on numerous occasions before, so let us just say that this makes me very happy.
Before the Indelicates, we had Lily Rae (who reminded me at different points of Kirsty MacColl, Ute Lemper and PJ Harvey, but more than anything reminded me of the experience of listening to Amy Winehouse's first album and knowing that there's something remarkable there, but it hasn't quite hatched yet. Definitely someone on whom I intend to keep an eye.
Also, Keith TOTP And His Minor UK Indie Celebrity AllStar Backing Band, who possibly bit off more than they could chew by playing 'Anyone Fancy A Chocolate Digestive?' when less than half the band had heard it before, much less played it. At one point I did fear they might be stuck playing it forever if thedavidx didn't work out a way to tell them when to end it.

Before Devant, though...that was something else. Met augstone in Dray Walk, which is clearly the epicentre of Earth's hipness. I could feel it pressing in on me, like the atmosphere of Jupiter but with haircuts. Then returned to Vessel's art exhibition for the closing show, with performances by Mr Solo and martylog. After which...a procession. I like processions, it's just a shame they're normally associated with causes. I suppose this one was too, a bit, but the signs were stuff like THIS IS HEAVY, and DOWN WITH SIGNS, and CLAP. Initially Aug had the CLAP, but then he left me with it, which I wasn't that happy about. Until, as we made our way along Portobello Road, some people did clap. And then outside a restaurant, Foz? (who was dressed as an orang utan) serenaded some diners with his pink ukelele, and I held the CLAP sign above him, and people clapped. This may be the proudest moment of my life to date.

Why did Day Watch get such bad reviews? It doesn't have the shocking novelty of Night Watch, obviously, but otherwise it seemed a worthy successor in every way. Possibly it even had more of an emotional core, without that feeling as tacked on as it can in genre adventure films. Plus, some great bodyswap comedy. I love bodyswap comedy, so long as I don't have to watch a whole film of it.

If not quite my new hero then certainly my new person reminiscent of Heroes, specifically Micah: Adam Dabrowski, who took control of the Lodz tram network with a remote control.

I didn't have terribly high hopes for Thursday night; as much as I love The Indelicates, likely gigging companions were being a bunch of straightlords and staying in, and I was starting to sympathise with them as my energy faded with the day. Still, what the Hell, give it a try, right? So I headed to the Regency to fuel up - and who should I find there but a couple of Pembroke friends, with whom I could then have a pint, filling that awkward support band gap between hometime and showtime. And then from there, down to the show (where being the Windmill, I was of course far too early, but I can never take the risk that this once they'll be running promptly) where again I bump into people I know - one I've known for ages but whom I now consider more part of charleston's cast, and one via emofringe. I love London's eddies, the way the flow can always be guaranteed to bring someone along. Even if it is interesting to notice the different ecologies it sustains - I know some people were put off this particular Indelicates show by the Metro recommendation (which didn't seem to have had all that much impact), where of course to some people (and some bands) that would be a deal-maker, not breaker. I understood more about this for a moment, at the show, but only as the sort of evanescent epiphany which, written down, could only ever be a "the smell of petroleum prevails throughout".
The Indelicates were of course excellent, as ever (next single 'America' deserves to make them huge, though if it does it will mainly do so with people who miss the point), and top support Restlesslist (I think?) weren't bad either; as with most instrumental bands, I would rather they played in a greasy spoon, but the use of inflatable elephants as percussion instruments is always to be encouraged.

I was pointed at an interesting but flawed article on music in The Wire (can you spot the generalisation/mistake he makes?), but within it is contained a link to a David Simon interview which all Wire fans should read. Spoiler-free, too, thank heavens - I'm only three episodes into the fourth season myself. I'm resisting the urge to quote as best I can, because it would soon turn into a repost of the whole damn article, but I found his comments on why the show owes more to the Greeks than Shakespearea particularly resonant. Ditto his thoughts on making "the world we are depicting that much more improbable and idiosyncratic and, therefore, more credible", and the mantra "fvck the average reader". Oh, sod it - one more:
"In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed."*
(The interview was conducted by Nick Hornby, of all people. The tragedy is that once he gets outside his lucrative middlebrow comfort zone, he's really not bad - he wrote a horror/SF piece for the McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales which I found properly chilling)

One of the better blogs I've seen on the Guardian site lately: Richard Smith, whose Seduced & Abandoned is one of the few journalism collections which comes close to working as a book, considers the decline of gay clubbing, or at least of a certain generation of gay clubs.

*It is not only America which has no place for heroes, of course. Consider the volunteer cliff rescue coastguard who breached health and safety rules in the course of saving a teenage girl's life; dressed down for this appallingly maverick behaviour, he has now resigned.