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

Oh, Proud. Not content with having crappy photography on the wall and charging a fiver for a small glass of wine which isn't even in a clean glass, you always find a new way to annoy. Apparently even empty water bottles in one's bag constitute terribly dangerous contraband. Bet the tossers don't even recycle the ones they confiscate, either. Bevan 17 were good once exliontamer became audible (their house sound mix always seems to push the vocals down, I suspect because most of the bands who play there have lyrics you wouldn't want to hear), and their alleged name is now even less convincing because if they're not Bevan 17, they're Sex Bob-omb. Speaking of which, en route I read the final Scott Pilgrim. ( mild spoilers ) but I really don't want to see Michael Cera trying to pull it off.

Otherwise, I have been watching a lot of films. One at the cinema: Inception. Which felt more 3D than most of the 3D films I've seen. And which apparently some people have said is difficult to understand. Some people are very stupid. ( spoilers ) Also, Eames is my hero.

The rest, though, were from the library, offering free DVD loans all weekend, presumably in order to get visitor numbers up and stave off the axe. With which aim, and for my own benefit, I was happy to assist. First, Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box. Even if you haven't seen it, you'll know her look, but what surprised me was how innocent she comes across for most of the film. Oh, and that for something so scandalous, it devoted so much of its time to the downward slope; I had expected the tacked-on unhappy ending of a Crime Doesn't Pay flick, but instead it had that slow, second half decline common to pretty much every film ever made about a junkie. Still, the London scenes have a terrible beauty to them - and while I couldn't credit the idea of a streetwalker who looks like Lulu, apparently Brooks did herself end up as an escort for a while after she burned all her bridges.

Continuing with the silent German theme: Fritz Lang's Dr Mabuse, and if you think the Propaganda song is long, you've never seen the film, of which I only managed Part One (two and a half hours). There's some great glowering from the Dr himself, but too often his schemes are stupidly convoluted even for a master villain, his aims unworthy and his methods silly. Also, his name is Mabuse, right? Which to me suggests self-abuse. And then his adversary is called von Wenk. I don't think this can have been deliberate, but it does still get in the way.

And finally - and with more overtly deliberate self-abuse themes - The Ages of Lulu, Bigas Luna's adaptation of a novel I read years back because it was referenced in a Jack song. The adaptation is fairly faithful, which is to say it's filth - the sort of European film you can only distinguish from p0rn in so far as the scenes between the screwing are more downbeat, and the camera angles show a bit of imagination. Oh, and it features Javier Bardem, looking even more like Till from Rammstein than usual, having lots of gay sex; I know some people who'd watch it for that alone.

Another film I'd been meaning to see for ages: Network. Like They Live, I wonder whether its anti-TV vitriol is still too much for it to be broadcastable? Strange if so, because if Network has one message it's not anger - even if it is the "I'm as mad as Hell and I'm not going to take this anymore" speech which everyone quotes. No, it's how the Spectacle will assimilate anything, ( spoilers, for a 1976 film, but still ) Just look at all the money Rage Against the Machine made Sony last Christmas.

The Sunday wobble about which I've posted previously wasn't the whole weekend, of course. There was a leaving do for rosamicula, which doubled as a welcome home for dawnage and whatever Rick's LJ is, as if in obedience to some hitherto unknown Law of Conservation. At the Walrus, which I've always wanted to check out simply for the name, but which I usually only pass en route to the more prosaically named Horse. I'm not sure what it would be like as a winter pub, but in summer, it has the garden to be a godsend. Then another new drinking destination for Saturday's birthday festivities, Bourne & Hollingsworth, which exists somewhere between wartime speakeasy and provincial tea-room, and serves cocktails in teacups, and where I made my first attempt at MP3 DJing, for a given value of 'DJing' and certainly not one which merits posting a setlist, before heading on to DSM where I remember very little beyond the presence of the DBB. I blame the Laundry novels for any current addiction to TLAs.

The sketch which made me laugh most in last night's (as ever, admittedly patchy) Mitchell & Webb was Caesar. But the ones which most impressed me were the one where they bit the Apple hand that feeds, and especially the opening self-criticism session. As against Peep Show, their own work sometimes gets accused of a certain traditional, cosy quality. Good to see them rolling with those punches and coming back with this level of savagery.

When it wasn't giving me the fear re: space, one of the things I like about that Ray Bradbury collection* I'm reading is that, for all that it came out through a science fiction imprint, it doesn't feel obliged to be all SF. I'm only a quarter of the way through, but if a story doesn't need to involve a spaceship or a time machine, then Bradbury doesn't throw one in just to keep within his genre; sometimes all you need is two men meeting on a beach. As I may have mentioned once or twice before, I'm not too keen on genre boundaries, which is why a project like the Neil Gaiman co-edited anthology Stories interests me. If you know McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, this is basically a less confrontational, more entryist approach to that. The cover, instead of a masked lion-tamer, is just contributor names - it's almost as studiedly uninformative as the title. And where Chabon's introduction railed against "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory short story", Gaiman simply extols the joy of the story in which the main question is - "what happened next?" The two share a couple of authors - two of the big beasts, in fact, Michael Moorcock and Gaiman himself, both among the main reasons I'm reading either collection in the first place. Beyond them, Stories makes a deliberately wide-ranging selection. There are other people I actively want to read - Gene Wolfe, Joe Hill. There are people I've vaguely meant to read - Michael Swanwick, Walter Mosley. Then there are people I'd never have thought to read, some reviewers' darlings - Joyce Carol Oates - and some big sellers - Jodi Piccoult. The clever bit being, of course, that for any reader, each of those four categories is going to include a completely different selection of names. In the interests of fairness, I'm reading every story, and if I've not been convinced to investigate the oeuvre of any of the writers I wasn't already interested in, nor has any of them been quite as bad as I expected (though there is something of a fixation on stories of elderly siblings). Obviously, part of me hopes that the people coming in for Oates will be rather more impressed by Gaiman...but the world's not quite that satisfying, is it? And if nothing else, I will probably read some more Mosley. Maybe even some Swanwick, though I was put off by the self-evident falseness of one of his central conceits: apparently characters in books don't read books. Even leaving aside the bookish heroes of MR James, Lovecraft and Borges, what about Dorian Gray, Don Quixote, Scott Pilgrim?

*I put the non-Bradbury part of Monday's post into the 'who do you write like' meme currently prowling Livejournal, and it told me Edgar Allen Poe. I was quietly pleased, but then realised I was missing a trick, especially when I saw Bradbury himself was one of the answers, and entered his contribution instead, but apparently he writes like Douglas Adams.

Sometimes I feel like I'm living at right angles to everyone else's London. Ironically, what brought this home to me was crossing Oxford Circus on the diagonal. How long is it since they relaunched it that way? Months, at least. Yet until yesterday I'd had no cause to see it, much less use it. Even yesterday I was cheating slightly, I needed to cross back across Portland Place further up, but it was too good a chance to miss.

Sobriety, like any altered state of mind, is quite fun as an occasional thing - but feels a bit worrying if you suspect it's becoming a habit. Spent Sunday and Monday lolling around abstemiously, watching Stephen Fry on Wagner and The Kid Stays In The Picture and such. By Tuesday evening, my craving for Pimm's and comedy was strong, which made it damned fortunate that diamond_geyser's living room Edinburgh previews have resumed. Unnervingly, her new house appears to be exactly the same as her old house, except with a different man in the basement. Tom Craine and Nat Luurtsema were the acts, neither names which meant anything to me beforehand and both with acts which were very much still works in progress, but entertaining nonetheless and I would recommend them to anyone spending August in the relevant bit of Scotland.
Then out again last night to the George Tavern. A lot of venues which strive to feel rock'n'roll are in fact just grotty and rubbish - the late and unlamented Nambucca being a particularly spectacular example - but somehow the George works it. The sound is not especially subtle, but the feel is right, and it thoroughly suited Bevan 17. The headliners were the Ethical Debating Society, a band I've been vaguely meaning to see for ages, and though they were pleasingly energetic, by the time they came on I was not. A couple of songs, then home.

I don't disagree with the general feeling that the new Gaga video is a bit of a let-down - but only as compared to its predecessors. It's still leagues ahead of something like the new Rihanna, in which she's apparently trying to set the record for Least Convincing Pop Video Sapphism. Not that starlets cavorting suggestively was exactly Gaga's invention, obviously, but the Rihanna effort just looks so tawdrily bandwagonesque. Whereas Kylie's 'All the Lovers' video, for all its literal mountain of writhing flesh, feels distinct. Because it's got its own personality - or rather her own personality, that old bright and sunny Kylie charm, just updated with a little more physicality.

So Tough! So Cute! So nearly. When hospitalsoup saw that on her actual birthday, round the corner from her house, there was an indie disco whose flyer mentioned one of her old bands - well, you have to check that out, don't you? And it really ought to have been great. They played stuff that indie discos should play - 'Sweeping the Nation', Belle & Sebastian, 'I Can't Explain' - and stuff I didn't recognise but which I liked - Jens Lekman was the one we actually investigated. I was perhaps not fully prepared for a twee night - I'd spent most of the day listening to Easyworld and the new Christina Aguilera, before watching a particularly manly episode of Justified (albeit one which also had a rather sweet bit about Christmas elves at the end, which provided me with the first non-pathological explanation I've ever heard for why anyone might become a dentist). But still, I was well up for a dance. Now, admittedly it didn't help that there were two bonkers girls dancing so effusively that they were occupying the whole dancefloor, but in a lot of contexts that would have been an encouragement rather than a discouragement to others. The problem was the space. In many ways the Drop is like the Buffalo Bar - even down to having an odd arms-length relationship with the pub upstairs (the Three Crowns, on the corner of Stoke Newington High St and Church St). But the benches around the walls were the only seats - tables, but no stools for the other side of them. And where the Buffalo Bar has those pillars to break up the space, this was just a shoebox, a shape which seems incapable of retaining an atmosphere. It's a good location and good DJs and it just needs the teensiest bit of interior design to be a good night. I hope it gets it.

I'm never quite sure what I think of pop art. Except I do know that I hate the strain which takes a comics panel out of context, sticks it in a frame and then makes out that the framer rather than the guy who drew it is the Artist. Understandably, comics artist Brian Bolland feels even more strongly on this point.

*Not that I wish to appear prudish or anything, but blimey! I remember those innocent days when Britney's 'If You Seek Amy' seemed risque, but it's like Gaga, Britney and Christina have got into some kind of arms race of filth where what seemed shocking two years ago is now gentle sauciness in comparison. If the ante keeps getting upped at this rate, it can't be long before one of them releases a track called 'Triple Penetration FTW'.

On Wednesday I went to Catch, which has changed a lot in the past few years, to see a show headlined by Tim Ten Yen, who hasn't. The bill also featured a band called Hot Beds, who had a song about how Christmas now starts in October which worked both as a critique of festival creep and a big overwrought festive ballad which they can get away with playing outside December because it's about precisely that. Good work. I was, however, primarily there for the 18 Carat Love Affair who, as well as the usual delights, deployed a top hat and ace new track 'Dominoes'.
Catch might not be quite as typically, terribly East London as it used to be, but Friday found me in an even more atypical East London venue, in that it was seven storeys up (I think that's even higher than Collide-A-Scope) and done up like some kind of voodoo surf kitchen. Even before I started drinking, I saw a pink elephant trot past; fortunately, investigation confirmed that others could see it too and it was in fact a small child wearing a pink elephant head. Probably. It says a lot about The Deptford Beach Babes that they find places like this to play. That's a compliment, by the way.

As Peep Show bows out (and was this series the best extended advertisement for contraception ever aired?*), the comedy baton is handed over and The Thick of It returns. The new choice of minister interests me; Chris Langham having been, shall we say, rather too open-minded about acceptable sexual behaviour, they've this time opted for Rebecca Front, who if anything has the opposite problem; we should probably expect a Jan Moir cameo before season's end.

"Parents who think the new film of Maurice Sendak's picture book Where the Wild Things Are is too frightening for children can "go to hell", the author has said." It's a long time since I read the book, I'm not sure if I'm even that bothered about the film, but this piece gives me massive respect for the man.

Like most people, my first Nabokov was Lolita; for my second I took a recommendation and tried Despair, which almost finished him for me, but last week I finally had a third try and plumped for Pale Fire and, well, he's not a one-hit wonder. ( sufficiently pretentious that I felt a cut was in order )
Also, the last king of Kinbote's distant homeland, Zembla, is called Charles Xavier. The book came out one year before the debut of the X-Men, but somehow I can't picture Stan or Jack coping with Nabokov's prose.

*Though I have just found the perfect childcare solution.
**Well, the third canto has some moments of beauty, but otherwise we're in the authentically bathetic territory of the sort of sub-Frost American poet who gets good reviews of their collected works in the Guardian, but in which reviews the quoted excerpts convince you never, ever to read any of the work in question.
***OK, there's Angie Bowie's autobiography, but even that involved a ghostwriter whom I suspect of setting her up for a fall. Certainly, spending that much time in her company would make me want to do the same.

Friday: an excellent night at Black Plastic, which augstone has already written up pretty much perfectly, but then locked. Bah. A dreamlike quality to events, right from the start where I walked past the venue three times in spite of having been there before. More space than at the Star, which I know is always more of a benefit for the crowd than for the promoters, but nor did it feel empty - and crucially, of the people who were there, emphatically unlike the Star, they were all the right sort. I approve.
Saturday: out to Epping for one of the more rural Tubewalks, complete with bunnies, a friendly horse and a huge amount of butterflies. Plus, a peculiar gate, my first nettling of the year (symptoms totally eradicated by the quick application of Vaseline Intensive Care, so that's one to remember) and a fun time walking around the Theydon Bois perimeter defences. Also, did you know there are cattle grids to stop cows walking on to the the M25? Which is handy, but no obstacle to a Tubewalker (in your face, cows), so I went down and briefly stood on the M25, just because. In the evening I was planning to have a quiet night in, or maybe just the one. Or two. Or oh no, not gin too.
Sunday: a very pleasant day, but one which ended early on account of my being dead.

So, I'm assuming we've all seen the eleventh Doctor's outfit and the new companion's name now (Amy Pond? Between this and River Song, does this mean we can also expect him to meet Veronica Lake in the next historical?). But, were we all aware that Tom Baker is finally reprising the role of the Fourth Doctor in a new run of audios by Paul Magrs? And in Who related news, Sherlock Holmes (a fictional creation of Arthur Conan Doyle's inspired by his meeting with the Fourth Doctor, as well as a real person with whom the Seventh teamed up - don't ask) is getting a new TV series written by Who's Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Only problem being, it stars the rather bland Benedict Cumberbatch and will be "remaking Holmes as a “dynamic superhero” figure" - apparently the exact same take as the forthcoming Robert Downey Jr film, but with a vastly less charismatic lead and presumably a far smaller budget. Wouldn't a more distinctive approach be a better idea?

Black Plastic on Saturday was a classic example of how London's greedy venues threaten to cripple their own trade with the short-termist desire for a buck; the Star had also booked in two or three birthday parties, taking up lots of space (including, for the first few hours, what should have been the dancefloor) with people who had no particular interest in the music or the night. Or indeed, much interest in music in general; they were in a trendy East London venue, so whatever they were hearing, must be cool. Not cool enough to make them dance or anything, but cool enough that whatever had been played, wouldn't have been able to scare them off. Even once the tables finally moved, there were too many of them standing around talking, making the place feel like a bar, and have I ever mentioned how much I hate bars? I salute the courage and indefatigibility of the DJs for making sure that there were still classic moments in amongst all this, but why does doing a night in this city have to be such an uphill struggle?

The temperature seemed to be trying to cycle through three seasons in a day, but I finally made it down to Shooter's* Hill on Friday. I'm not sure quite why this had become such a goal of mine, even with the Luxembourg lyric bolstering the Alan Moore story about local boy Steve 'No Relation' Moore. Perhaps it's just like when you're looking for a particular pen absent-mindedly, and it imperceptibly mounts to become an obsessive hunt, because I can't claim any particular epiphany as the lodestone which was drawing me there. Although it is lovely...well, not so much the main road which takes you there, but you can start from Greenwich and wander through the bit of the park which always seems to get neglected in picnic season, with the flowers and the woodpeckers and deer. And then out across Blackheath, which is so open and happy in the sun, when the werewolves aren't out. And then the rather dusty, concrete, Ballardian stretch - but then you're between commons and woods and the sudden apparition of a tower which claims the awesome name of Severndroog Castle, and these are proper broad-leafed, light, English woods, where bluetits titter and kids are still making rope swings rather than doing anything edgy or urban or Mail-baiting. And if you carry on over the hill, and come out of the wood, you'll realise there's no postcode on the street sign, and you've accidentally walked out of London, and you need a drink and a sit down.

When Grant Morrison released Seaguy back in 2004, it wasn't very well received. The story of a superhero born too late, living in a world where everything is perfect (isn't it?) and there's no evil left to fight (is there?) just didn't seem to strike a chord in the boom years. Now we've realised that the whole age of ever-rising prosperity and ever-bigger plasma screens was a mirage, it looks so astonishingly prescient that one wonders at people ever missing the point. Perfect timing, then, for the sequel over which Morrison essentially held DC to ransom for his big event work, Slaves of Mickey Eye. Except now his point (those cuddly institutions who told you everything was OK? Do you really trust them?) seems almost too obvious. Prophecy's a tough game. Fortunately, there's quite enough Mad Brilliant Ideas TM, moments of genuine pathos and mysteries as yet unsolved to keep one interested beyond the obvious message. If you prefer the Invisibles and Filth Morrison to the superheroics (not that I've ever felt the distinction was particularly noticeable), then this one is for you.

*The apostrophe seems to come and go, but I prefer it with one.

Proxy Music are the only time I've ever seen a tribute band where I've also seen the real band. Well, I once saw a Smiths tribute and I've seen Morrissey live, which I suppose the Eno hardcore might say is the same thing - although pleasingly, and contrary to what I heard, they're not entirely an Eno-era band. The shouts for 'Dance Away' failed to provoke a Step Brothers-style riot, and acknowledging that even Eno knows Stranded is the best album, they played a stunning 'Mother of Pearl'. If they have a problem it's that their Bryan Ferry is too naturally beautiful and too good a singer, but I suppose it's easier to find that than someone overcoming his deficiencies with sheer force of character like the original, who by definition would probably be busy being famous in his own right.
The Lexington, aka relaunched Clockwork, is not bad either. They've gone for a whiskey joint feel downstairs, like the Boogaloo with a more dedicated palette, but also got in more draught at prices which are the cheaper end of London pub. Plus, if people are still dancing and drinking they seem happy for a night to carry on past the advertised end time for, ooh, about 90 minutes when I left and it was still going strong. Recommended.

When all hope seemed lost, when the forces of darkness seemed to have triumphed and even our best and brightest to be unable to salvage things this time - Grant Morrison finally managed to write an issue of Final Crisis as we knew it should have been written. Where previous issues have been incomprehensible in a DC continuity frottage sort of way, this was incomprehensible in that joyous 'Grant's brain's exploding!' way we know and love. I am hesitant to quote it because I don't want to spoil it, and because I have little comment to add beyond wanting to punch the air pretty much every page. Those of you who read the collections - it will be worth reading this one, and putting up with the mess earlier, just for this ending. Although you might be best off waiting for an omnibus which includes all the Morrison components ie 'Submit' and Superman Beyond and 'Last Rites' too, because I can understand why people who didn't read those found it baffling. But as with Secret Invasion - if spin-offs are being written by the writer of the core series, why aren't people reading those too? What kind of mentality reads a comic Because It's An Event and not because they like the creators?
In an exit interview Morrison insists there were no rewrites - which I find implausible, but whatever. He also confirms something I've long suspected, that he really has no affinity with the character of Wonder Woman.

Went to the Science Museum's late session on Wednesday - what this means is, there are no bloody children cluttering the place up, so you can play with all the toys, and there's booze. Free booze if one member of your party is star enough to find a laminated 'free drinks' card lying around, which one of ours did. Go her. We were late in on account of a science jam when we arrived (the queue was around two sides of the fairly sizeable building. I am beginning to fear queues, I have seen too many lately). I was entertained by Foucault's Pendulum (chiefly on account of reading the book recently, it bored everyone else), loved the stargate-y laser-y thing (it had no placard I could see, so not that educational, but still awesome) and accidentally set off George III's microscope. Science!
In other Science! news, saw a guy at Russell Square yesterday who had about a dozen wires in his head, Just normal wires, in various colours, coming up from the back of his collar and then connecting to his scalp at various points where they went at least under the skin, and possibly further.

Yesterday I was handed a flyer for Czech mail-order brides, "unspoiled by feminism". Which is not just sleazy, but baffling. If you want the loaded and lonely, surely you flyer on Friday night as the City bars are chucking out, or in Knightsbridge tobacconists, not in Victoria on a Wednesday lunchtime?
Then again, this was shortly after I learned that Cardinal Place has a wind consultant called Professor Breeze, so it may just have been one of those days when plausibility goes out the window. Consider also the state of the Comedy that evening, where they had hybrid Hallowe'en/Christmas decorations up - so there's a werewolf menacing the tree, for instance, which has been decked with a string of skulls. I was there to see The Melting Ice Caps, aka Luxembourg's David Shah solo. And that is *solo* as in a one-man show, just him and a backing track (except for the two songs where he's joined by a flipbook wrangler). It can't be easy to stand up there and perform with no band, no instrument, no Dutch courage, not even any of the overacting and performance art techniques you'd get from someone like Simon Bookish, but he does it - stands there and sings his songs, beautiful songs about love and time and making the best of it all. Lovely, if heartbreaking - both for the songs in and of themselves, and that this is happening at half eight in a pub basement, rather than in the grand setting it deserves.
So of course because it's an implausible day, why wouldn't he be followed by a band with Foxy Brown on vocals, a total Shoreditch refugee on rhythm guitar and one of the From Dusk 'Til Dawn vampires on histrionic lead?

Newsarama are running a pretty revealing ten-part interview with Grant Morrison about All-Star Superman, one of the best superhero comics ever. I post this for the fans but seriously, even if you're only a casual/Greatest Hits comics reader, even if you think you don't like Superman, I don't blame you but this is the exception.

I finally remembered to check for an update on the story about the pirates stealing 30 tanks, which has been driven from the news by the small matter of the world's economy falling over and bursting into flames. Apparently:
"United States warships have surrounded the Faina for weeks to prevent the pirates from trying to unload the weapons, and a Russian guided missile frigate is traveling to the area."
It was seized a month ago! If the Russian navy is always this slow, we have so little to worry about from Putin.

For anyone given to complaining about txtspk as part of the decline of modern literacy &c, I give you 1880s emoticons.

Can anyone find a definitive story on which version of Battlestar Galactica the lorry driver was watching at the wheel? Obviously there's no excuse for inattentive driving, but if he's hooked on the new version I can at least sympathise - whereas if he was watching the original, as some reports claim, then add bad taste to dangerous driving and throw away the key.

Went to that big Concrete and Glass festival last night. Well, sort of - I went to one venue right on the periphery where the only three bands who interested me* were very thoughtfully all playing not only in the same venue, but the same room. augstone and I attempted to take advantage of this by smuggling chairs into that room, but others, jealous of our seating, stood spitefully in front of us. Not a bad little venue, either - called the Brady Arts Centre. You could tell it didn't get used for many gigs, though; when I first walked in the lights were blinding, and you could smell the scorch as the dust burned off them, like the first time a radiator goes on in Autumn. They'd also had to bring in a bar - and not just cans, draught, but you could see the workings giving it a splendid mad scientist's lab feel - "You call me mad? I, who have created pints?" And they were using the bottom drawer of a fridge for the cashbox. A sign on the door to the garden said children shouldn't play unsupervised, because there was an open pond; I went out looking for it, didn't find it and was briefly locked out.
Weird being in Whitechapel a day after playing binge catch-up on Warren Ellis' Freakangels.

I've been reading two biographies of peculiar writers, AJA Symons' The Quest for Corvo and Steve Aylett's Lint. Though written 70 years apart, they have a lot in common. Both writers, like so many, struggled to find success during their lifetime - something one cannot in all honestly be completely surprised at given the work. Lint's novels included I Blame Ferns, Nose Furnace and Sadly Disappointed (about a child who is not possessed by the devil); he was also the writer of the short-lived TV show Catty and the Major and the seventies comic The Caterer. Corvo wrote historical romances, translations from languages in which he was not fluent and a history of the Borgias in which he refused to use the word 'poison' and which he eventually disowned in an argument over grammar, but is best known for Hadrian the Seventh, a book in which his Mary Sue becomes Pope and saves the world, the efforts of thinly-disguised versions of his enemies notwithstanding. On which note, both had a knack for making enemies. Lint favoured the principle of 'effortless incitement', by which he was able to provoke violence even in casual passers-by, but was the subject of particular loathing from the critic and dullard Cameo Herzog (author of the Empty Trumpet books); Corvo had a spectacular feud with the Aberdeen Free Press, but beyond that was convinced that all the forces of the Catholick Church were arrayed against him (he had failed in two early bids for the priesthood, in spite of a liking for young boys). Of course, upon their deaths such enemies as had outlived them were quick to change their tune and hail their genius - something which threw several of Lint's enemies given the persistent 'Lint is dead' rumours during his lifetime. Both cut odd figures - "Lint filled the room like a buffalo, with a haircut like a Rolodex and a greying beard like a surf explosion", while Corvo described himself as a "haggard shabby shy priestly-visaged individual". Corvo claimed to have invented colour photography; from childhood Lint was obsessed with the search for new and unnamed colours. Both have been survived by their work (and in Corvo's case by his handwriting), leading to small sodalities of devotees - Stephen Fry is among Corvo's fans, while Alan Moore gives a rave review of Lint on the back of Aylett's book. Lint, described by Gore Vidal as "entering the world of letters like a fat man jumping into a swimming pool", died while writing his thankfully incomplete attempt at autobiography, The Man Who Gave Birth To His Arse; Corvo left the scandalous The Desire And Pursuit Of The Whole, having earlier declared "I am now simply engaged in dying as slowly and as publicly and as annoyingly to all of you professing and non-practising friends of mine as possible", attempted to commit suicide by gondola and then threatened to publish an edition of pornography in the names of his enemies (their crime, for the most part, that they declined to 'lend' him further money once it became clear that they were never going to get the last lot back).
Neither of these men is quite plausible, but one of them is real.

"Oddly inspiring and supremely pointless" - Andrew from Swimmer One interviews Bill Drummond.

Bran Mak Morn - the movie. With a Solomon Kane film also in the works, could it be that one day not that far away, Robert E Howard will no longer just be known as 'the Conan guy'?
(The director's past work does not enthuse me, it's true, but he does mention that he's also a fan of Slaine)

*Flipron, (The Real) Tuesday Weld and Mr Solo, whose band now contains more people than David Devant. All very good, obv.