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

Here's a bit of a join-the-dots: sadly I can't make it myself, but on Saturday, Stewart Lee is reading from one of the founding texts of psychogeography, Arthur Machen's 'N'. Which is also a very good horror story. The story is about Stoke Newington, and so it's an appropriate part of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival, which also has an appearance by China Mieville. China Mieville was apparently meant to be reviving Swamp Thing, and work on the comic was well advanced, but has now been binned - because rather than a Mature Readers series, DC want Swamp Thing back in their main superhero universe. Even though most of that universe has lately been telling 'mature' stories anyway, in the sense meaning 'immature', all blood and guts and angst. Even though Swamp Thing going Mature Readers was where America discovered Alan Moore, where the groundwork was laid for Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison going over there, where - to simplify ever so slightly - American comics became worth reading. And they're backing away from the chance to do that again (edit: here's more on what we've lost). Which makes me worry that DC is still on the wrong lines. Which is particularly unfortunate given Paul Cornell (a name Doctor Who fans should know) is apparently about to sign an exclusive with them. I already felt some trepidation - his best comics work all having been at Marvel, most notably the cancelled, glorious Captain Britain & MI:13 - but looked forward to what he was going to do with Lex Luthor in Action Comics. Still, I don't want him trapped in a company which makes such reliably bad editorial decisions lately. On the other hand, his most recent output elsewhere was BBC medical horror pilot Pulse, and that wasn't very good. As a massive hypochondriac, I expected it to make difficult viewing - but because I would be getting freaked out, not because I was so bored by the parade of cliches, played mainly by actors you recall being quite good in something a few years back but not having seen much of lately. I don't know, maybe people who like medical drama - and I know there are plenty - will enjoy it more. I did notice that contrary to advance hype, while Cornell scripted, it was based on an idea by someone else. That may explain it.

Wednesday was always going to be interesting; Dickon's new event, Against Nature, at Proud, with The Vichy Government and the Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra on the same bill. Proud's South Gallery turns out to be significantly less vile than the other bit; it could still have done without the staff pointedly rearranging the furniture while Dickon and retro_geek were trying to keep people dancing after the acts, but those who did stay were treated to the unexpected ballroom dance skills of keith_totp. Vichy were distorted to fvck - which is how I like them best - and MFMO were deeply numerous, appropriate given they had two new songs about fleas. Plus, improvisational tales of Empire and derring-do from Jingo & Butterfield, who apparently caused one walk-out, clearly from humourless nitwits. All in all, a good night, which is not something I ever thought I would say about Proud.

A venue I used to love was the Garage, which finally reopened about a year back now, but to which I'd not been until a surprise trip last night. It's disconcertingly clean and shiny now, and has a higher ceiling, but that's probably for the best because it was always a bit of a sweatbox so yesterday could otherwise have been Hellish. I was there to see the Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, always a band where I've quite liked what I heard but failed to investigate further. And after last night, I possibly understand them even less - which is not a bad thing. I had them down as, more or less, the slightly less daft Horrors - but at its finest moments, the gig could almost have passed for the Sisters. The singer reminds me of that kid everyone vaguely knew who wanted to be Dave Wyndorf, and almost made it work. The crowd were a real mix - punks, psychobillies, retro chic kids, and one man who looked like Mugatu from Zoolander modelling his new 'scary clown' look. Also, much more mixed-race than rock crowds tend to be. I enjoyed it, but I still didn't entirely feel it, if that makes sense. The best explanation I can manage is that they sound quite Earthbound, something I've only experienced once before, when seeing of all people Eric Clapton (don't ask). I think all the bands who really sing to me are trying to escape the sublunary sphere - whether through traditional transcendence, the reflection in a nightbus window or just via someone else's pants. And here I don't hear that.

Spent Thursday evening sat in friends' garden until gone 10 and a fair amount of Friday reading in the park, then yesterday there again for a pleasingly languid picnic interrupted by one attempt at skipping, which I'm sure didn't used to feel so terrifying, but then that was about 20 years ago when my legs weren't so long and easily caught. Also my first ice cream of the year, except it turns out there age hasn't changed so much, and I still get the sauce down my front. Other weekend activities: Nuisance, which in amongst the beloved and the half-forgotten and the not-really-Britpop-but-it's-ace-so-who's-counting*, once again managed to redefine 'going too far' with an airing for Kula Shaker's 'Mystical Machine Gun'. Just as the Beatles' 'All You Need Is Love' is justified by its use in the final episode of The Prisoner without in any way being redeemed, so with 'Mystical Machine Gun' and Phonogram. Not that even 'Mystical Machine Gun' is as bad as 'All You Need Is Love', obviously. Nothing is.
Still, good night otherwise. Also, one of the Monarch's bouncers talks like a Mexican Darth Vader. Brilliant.
Then on Saturday, one of my occasional forays into DJing, this time at a masked ball. Turns out I'm no worse on the decks than usual without my peripheral vision, but it's amazing how badly even a little mask affects other stuff like dancing, stairs &c. How Doctor Doom copes I shall never know. I was what I believe the professionals call 'back to back' with augstone. But not like that. You can probably guess who picked what.
( No more music, thank you and goodnight )

Otherwise - the final Ashes to Ashes. Which reminded me a little of A Matter of Life and Death - never a bad thing - but even more so of another wartime film I once saw whose name I can never remember, where a group of people who have all had near misses on the way to the docks are on a cruise liner.( spoilers, obviously ) Wonderful.

On the other hand - Doctor Who. I had assumed that with Russell T Davies' departure we would also see the back of the hopeless Chris Chibnall, but no, apparently he has incriminating polaroids of Moffat too, so he doesn't just get to do one episode, he gets two! Reintroducing the Earth Reptiles! As soon as we see that he's called his Welsh village Cwmtaff, it's clear that the cluelessness and laziness we expect of Who's answer to Jeph Loeb are unimpaired, and so the episode lurches predictably from unoriginal and unconvincing jeopardy to cackhanded Issue of the Week speeches (as has been noted elsewhere - if you're doing a Middle East analogy, it might be better not to cast giant lizards as the Jews). And the redesign - ugh! So boringly human. I am of course blaming Chibnall for that, whereas all credit for the city visual at the end goes to the design team, and any good bits - the Doctor's conversation with the boy, for instance - are clearly attributable to Moffat on the final script polish. Seriously, though - eight minutes to cover an entire village with a surveillance network? That felt improbable, and since it accomplished nothing, it wasn't even an improbability which served a plot purpose. It was filler of the worst sort; you might as well just have had a chicken ride a unicycle around the church for three minutes singing 'Copacabana', that would at least have been novel.
(Who fans might also be interested to know that Radio 7 are airing a new series of Eighth Doctor stories - afraid this is the second, but I only barely caught the first myself)

*Although the ex-Menswear guest DJ did push it when he played Dolly Parton.

More than the usual weekend dose of Doctor Who; on Friday, after catching my first seven elephants (including James Bond elephant!) and a brief stop at Poptimism, I was one of the five Doctors at Are Friends Eclectic?. The eighth, obviously, because his TV career may not have been great but his outfit was the best. There may have been certain breaches of the First Law of Time and the Blinovitch Limitation Effect. AFE is great.
And then on Saturday, 'Vampires of Venice'. For some reason I hadn't got that excited in advance of this episode, in spite of having already seen the library card business. And there was plenty more to love, mainly in the interplay between the Doctor, Amy and Rory - the bouncing up and down with excitement, "let's not go there", hushing, combat deployment of Your Mum gags. But ultimately, it dragged a bit, resolution by Adam West-style climbing was anticlimactic, and how did it make any sense at all that a species change should be easier than a sex change? Not a disaster by any means, but a flawed mid-season entertainment. It's weird how even with Moffat in charge, Who is never consistently perfect. Perversely, I think it's somehow right that way.

Saturday: another Keith TOTP/Indelicates show. I've run out of things to say about these except that I swear 'I Hate Your Band' and 'Savages' get even better every time. Some Thee Faction-style intra-band ideological controversy when Simon said "our drummer's had to go to emergency homosexual rehabilitation camp"; this surprised me if only because Julia let him get away with "she said 'snatch'!" again. There was another band in between whose set seemed to last about 26 years, of which the first song was OK. They tried to flog us vinyl afterwards and I could quite legitimately reply "I don't buy records from people who diss Tesla". This on a night when I'd already discussed unicycles with the Vessel. I love my life. Would have hung around to give Black Daniel another chance, but my presence was required for dancing to pop at Don't Stop Moving. Mmmm, pop.

Strolled over to Hampstead yesterday for a combined birthday/engagement/welcome back to Britain drinks. Saw two puzzling things en route. One was a life-sized model camel which I somehow missed last time I went to ALE MEAT CIDER, even though it's just down the road. The other was a street sign where the legitimate N7 had been crossed out and graffiti added: 'N19! w@nkers'. I've heard about these youth gangs going by postcode affiliation, but they seem not really to have grasped how the system works. Terribly sad. Though as a Shield/Sons of Anarchy fan, I have to wonder whether these N19 loyalists call themselves One-Niners.

The Foreign Office circulates internally a lighthearted memo suggesting that it would be jolly nice if the Pope started behaving like a civilised member of the modern age; they apologise. The Pope, among his many and various other crimes, runs a global paedophile ring; he has not apologised, much less been prosecuted. And yet loathsome turds like Peter Hitchens and George Carey (the latter a Lord, of course, with a say in Parliament simply because he was in the racket) have the temerity to claim that christians are now the underdogs. When Pope Sidious is where he belongs, behind bars and being regularly raped by his burlier fellow inmates, then you can complain that christians are now the underdogs. And I shall smile benignly, suggest that the term 'prag' might be more precise, and carry on about my day in that brighter world.

Anyway. Friday. Wow. I approached the Evelyn Evelyn show with some trepidation because, while I find complaints about 'appropriation' and such from special interest groups uniformly tedious, I wasn't that impressed with the album either; a handful of good songs didn't save the general effect from being queasily sub-Lemony Snicket. Really, though, it is better conceived as the soundtrack to a show - and in the ornate Bush Hall, with a red velvet backdrop, we got that show played very well. Seeing the twins yoked together, playing guitar or keyboard or accordion with one arm each, or pausing for huddled conferences, the effect is very different. And, just to scotch any lingering arguments about disablism, there was someone in a wheelchair right down the front.
We also got a support band called Bitter Ruin who had very pop voices but cabaret songs - which worked out well - and solo and collaborative sets from Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley. The latter wasn't as good as I've seen him before - perhaps because he'd only just made his way in through the volcano aftermath, but surely that was all the more reason to play the bafflingly absent 'Dance While The Sky Crashed Down'? Palmer I've not seen before, but she was very good, doing a staggering duet on 'Delilah' with Bitter Ruin's female vocalist. Plus, we obviously got Neil Gaiman, initially on soiled kazoo but then with tambourine in one hand and a sign saying LOUDER! in the other.

Then up to Stay Beautiful where I thought we'd only be missing Ladynoise - no sacrifice at all. Except we get in and apparently we've missed a secret show by Adam Ant. Man! But then his band (aka Rachel Stamp) are setting up again and we're going to get to see him after all. This is brilliant, right? Well...no. As soon becomes apparent, he is not a well man. I've seen a few attempts to rework Springsteen's 'Born in the USA' as 'Born in the UK', and it never quite comes off, but this is still a low. 'Land of the brave, and home of the free, but they fvcked it up with CCTV', runs the chorus, biut mainly he's hectoring us about the killing of Sophie Lancaster. An admirable cause and I don't think there's a person at SB who would say otherwise, but for some reason Adam has a really hectoring tone, as though we don't care enough. Is it because we're not singing along to lyrics we've never heard before and he seems to be making up as he goes along? The song rambles along interminably in a way 'Born in the USA' never should; I go to the loo and the bar and when I get back he's still shouting that SHE GOT HER BRAIN SMASHED IN FOR BEING A PUNK ROCKER! I don't even dance to 'Prince Charming' later on, though I'm sure I will again soon enough.

And Stay Beautiful in general? I had a lot of fun, but it didn't allay my suspicions that this is too soon for a reunion. The 'final' one felt like an Event, with all the old hands out again; this just felt like any latter-day SB. And there are worse things to be, of course, but also grander ones. I did particularly like the bit where only one CD deck was working, because I always said that one day Love Your Enemies would be influential.

It is 2010 and yet on two consecutive nights this weekend, at different clubs, I heard songs by the intermittently brilliant Rialto. OK, Friday I was at a Britpop night, but Saturday I was at Feeling Gloomy to see The Indelicates (excellent as ever, obviously). Still, with a sky free of jet trails and the Lib Dems being taken seriously, it is fair to say that we live in strange times. Good strange times, though - I like it when the world abandons any pretence of narrative plausibility. In television shows, on the other hand, I tend to find it rather irksome, hence some of my problems with 'Victory of the Daleks'. Why did the Doctor call off the attack when the Daleks were blatantly going to renege and set off their doomsday weapon anyway? It wasn't as if he was even the one who defused it. Worse than the plot holes, though, was the hideous design of those new Alessi Daleks. So chunky and graceless!
It wasn't a totally lost cause, mind. While Ian McNeice's Churchill felt too much like an impressionist's take than an actor's, I liked how the Doctor didn't end up winning the war for him. Historicals can sometimes overwhelm the real figures they feature, make it look as if everything that's ever happened was down to the Doctor - but this emphasised the indomitability of the real man. And the first 15 minutes were great; who knew that Daleks, for all their lack of facial features, could look so effectively sly?
Also: the jammy dodger! And I love the way he calls her 'Pond'.

All my USTV has finished, with both Mad Men and Sons of Anarchy hitting their season ends last week. I'm intrigued by where the former's shake-up of the status quo will go next season, and whether we'll still be following those left behind (or leaving). And the latter...I'd been thinking for a while that Sons of Anarchy was as good as it was possible for television to be while not really being about anything, but I was being dense. Like all the decent American shows (except maybe Rome), it's about America. About what went wrong, and how, and whether the great ideal can be saved from that.

Saw two of my favourite bands over the past few days - also, incidentally, the two bands I think of whenever some fool asks why young bands aren't addressing the issues of the day. Any time you see such a diatribe, remember the options: the writer is unaware of The Vichy Government or The Indelicates, and hence too ignorant for anything he says to be worth attention; or else the writer could not understand their lyrics, or did not consider them sufficiently political because they made no mention of 'Tony B Liar more like', in which case he is too stupid for anything he says to be worth attention. Both bands are confident enough that their sets were pretty much stripped of the old favourites, and both are creative enough that it barely registered because the new stuff is at least as good. Where matters diverged was in the support. The Indelicates had England's finest chanson man, Philip Jeays, solo and even better that way, wowing an incongruously young section of the audience; a particularly melodic and vaguely Springsteen incarnation of Keith TOTP & his etcetera; and the increasingly lovely Lily Rae. Vichy, on the other hand, were lumbered with one Joyride. Given they caused only sorrow, and stayed in one place (the stage) when we really wished they'd depart, I wondered whether this name might be cause for a Trade Descriptions case, but apparently not. Ripping off The Fall and the Mary Chain as ineptly as I've ever seen, and that's saying something, they managed to be thoroughly rubbish in spite of having one member in a Girls Aloud t-shirt and a song with the chorus "I'm the Bishop of Southwark, it's what I do".

Just finished Max Adams' The Firebringers - At, science and the struggle for liberty in nineteenth-century Britain, which is a frustrating bloody book. The main problem I had was no fault of Adams' - he overlaps quite a bit with Richard Holmes' Age of Wonder, which I'd not long read. But the comparison does show how Holmes' 'relay race' structure serves him brilliantly, while Adams lacks restraint and tries to tell too many stories at once, breeding confusion and occasional repetition. I was mainly reading the book in so far as I wanted to know more about John Martin, the painter who "single-handedly invented, mastered and exhausted an entire genre of painting, the apocalyptic sublime". I've loved his work ever since I saw his final great trilogy, Judgment, in what is now Tate Britain - it hangs there still, though very badly situated. He was big news in his time, though critical opinion was not kind then and is even less so now; as far as I'm concerned he still sits only a very little behind his friend and contemporary Turner as one of the best painters, never mind British painters, ever. Adams, on the other hand, likes him more than the critics but less than the Regency public. Then, for whatever reason, he has attempted to make this a group biography - perhaps because he was told they sell better now, on which more later. So we also get the other Martin brothers: Richard the soldier (his autobiography is alas lost, so he mainly appears in 'mights'); Jonathan (yes, confusing, but in an age of high child mortality it happened a lot) the religious maniac who set York Minster ablaze; and William, who started as inventor and ended another lunatic, riding around on a self-designed velocipede with a brass-bound tortoiseshell as a helmet, selling pamphlets about how he'd been swindled, a few of the stories true but most sheer paranoia.
Except the Martin brothers are still not enough, so they become a spine for 'the Prometheans', an undeclared, unrealised movement united in their desire to free mankind. Their membership includes Shelley, Godwin, the Brunels, various politicians...or does it? Because Adams' definitin of Promethean ideals seems more Procrustean; obviously most of his posthumous conscripts don't quite fit it, for which they are ticked off. Shelley was too extreme in his declarations, hence unpublishable and useless - but the Reform Bills were too timid and compromised. There is still good stuff to be salvaged from among this historical kangaroo court, but it's a trial.
And then, of course, the publishers clearly told Adams that The Prometheans wouldn't sell, so the title had to be dumbed down to The Firebringers. It's a bit of a mess, but not an uninteresting one.

The weekend started with a bang at Black Plastic, but was subsequently a fairly quiet one. How terrifyingly grown up of me. Admittedly, Sunday's walk felt considerably less virtuous once we met msdaccxx coming the other way from Hendon when we were only going to Ally Pally, and any health benefit we might have derived from the project was probably lost somewhere between the wine and the trifle...but I have now done the whole Parkland Walk. Because, in spite of knowing the Finsbury Park to Highgate stretch backwards (whichever direction that might me), I've never done the whole of the rest, not until this weekend. Which meant I'd missed out on one particularly stunning view/potential suicide spot in particular. The Palace itself was playing host to a make-up artists' convention, the crowd around which had more goths and fewer orange people than I would have expected. Also, one person dressed as Johnny Depp in his Alice role.

Thursday was angelv's birthday, the first time I'd been into town in a while and the first time I'd ever had lovely, lovely strawberry and lime cider. On the bus afterwards, I was sat reading a comic when I was accosted by a stranger. Now, I often daydream about the potential meetings which reading material on public transport might unlock - I blame The Divine Comedy's 'Commuter Love'. But the only time anything ever came of it before was when I was reading Houllebecq's Atomised and, just as we got off the train at Derby, had a brief conversation with a girl who had recently read it and agreed that it was a massive disappointment. And this was no better, though in some ways more interesting, because Thursday's stranger was a psychologist, and having just come from some form of professional function, she was off her bloody face. She asked me whether I identified with any of the characters, and I said it wasn't so much about that as about a form of ritualised conflict, circumscribed yet open-ended and thus always available - much the same as some people find in sport. She asked whether I thought there were superheroes in the real world, and I said no, though there are supervillains - I instanced Dubya and the way he stole the thunder of the DC storyline about Lex Luthor becoming President by being real, and worse (then worried that this answer might sound a bit Tony B Liar, but decided against the balancing example of bin Laden as R'as al Ghul because even after Batman Begins, nobody ever recognises his name). Whether she even remembered any of this the next day, I have no idea, but it was definitely a higher calibre of conversation than one normally gets with drunk randoms on buses.
And because of that, because I haven't really got much else to post, because I needed some warm-up writing to do over the weekend and because I was vaguely thinking about doing something like this after my last general moan about the topic, here's what may or may not be a new regular feature, starting with the title which so interested the drunk psychologist: ( The last two weeks' comics )

'The Solitary Life of Cranes' is a lovely, strange little programme; the men who operate those towering cranes one sees dotted about explaining their experiences and perspective, over beautiful footage of London from a vantage point most of us will never share - high enough to be silent and detached, but low enough to recognise individual people. They come across quite like Wim Wenders' take on angels.

Two launch parties for augstone products this week; the H Bird single release and the Oxford Dons premiere. The former was fairly subdued; the latter, I think it is fair to say, got a bit out of hand, culminating in a spontaneous performance by Keith TOTP & His Minor 18 Carat All Star Backing Close-Ups (Featuring exliontamer), or something like that, which I'm hoping hasn't got us all barred from the N19 because I'm doing my birthday there this year. The show/film/artefact itself is hilarious, and coming soon to an internet near you. And I'm only an extra in this one.
In between launches, went to the Serpentine Gallery for the first time. Which is silly, but I hadn't realised a) it's free and b) one of the attendants is a friend. Small for a London gallery, but it has the advantage of being set in a ruddy great park, albeit one where the squirrels are no respecters of personal space. The current show, Design Real, is simply well-designed items laid out like artworks, and labelled only with a generic - SHOES, KNIFE, ARMOUR. If you want more, you can check the website - or go the central room, where there are Kindles with the same information. And never having used a Kindle before, I did find them very intuitive and pleasant to use, but they're considerably less portable than a paperback so I don't think text's iPod moment has come quite yet. After that, xandratheblue took me for veggie fish and chips, a matter on which I must respectfully disagree with both her and hoshuteki. I think the problem is, they both eat fish and expected something along similar lines. Whereas if someone presents me with chunks of deep-fried halloumi, I don't really mind what they call it, I just murmur 'cheeeeeeese' and adopt a blissed-out expression. Cheeeeeeeeese.

Philip Jeays' Christmas shows on the Barge have often tended towards the drunken (not least the time we took a trip to the beach afterwards), but last night still felt unusually tinged with chaos. The first sign was when, after the usual pleasant-but-would-work-better-in-the-background set from Peacock, the annual Speech Painter ordeal began. Except - he had a new poem. A reworking of Phil's 'Geoff', the song in which Phil talks about wanting to kill Geoff for his house, and shagging his wife. The reworking is called 'Phil', and you can imagine the general tone. The natural order is overturned! The Speech Painter is fighting back, and stranger, getting laughs!
From then on, everything feels slightly rackety. The boat is shaking more than usual. The new song with which Phil opens has the chorus "They're all whores!" (repeat x 3). I'm the first person whose number comes up (well, except the berk who requested 'Idiots In Uniform', but they clearly don't count) and when I ask on a sudden whim for 'London' instead of 'The Raj', there's confusion as to which version I mean. Lots of people are claiming tickets they don't have - including, in a moment of Epic Fail, the one Jeays took himself. Busted. One request is actually refused, which I don't think I've ever seen before. One table have to be reprimanded for talking.
And yet, amongst it all, the songs. There are some strange choices made, but also some of the best - 'Here I Am', 'Midnight in Trieste', 'Perry County'. In a world which has embraced Richard Hawley, there really should be broadsheet features for Philip Jeays too.

I hadn't been all that excited about Waters of Mars. I try my best to avoid spoilers, but I'd still encountered enough to make me very, very excited about Tennant's final outings as the Doctor and the Christmas regeneration. Especially after the lacklustre Planet of the Dead, this just seemed like another contractual obligation, a roadbump in the way. Until I saw the last trailer with the Doctor telling the crew of Bowie Base One that he was very sorry, but this was a fixed point, and he had to let them die. Then, suddenly, I was excited. ( spoilers )

Not the only Who showing at the moment, of course, because there's also The Sarah Jane Adventures. Except, half of this series has been written by the same Phil Ford who collaborated on Waters of Mars, and yet all his teatime stories have all been utter drivel. Yes, you can say 'it's only a kid's show' - and that's precisely what Ford must do, because every one of his stories has been an exercise in dumb 'will this do?', as against fine work by all the other writers. But the worst of the lot was last week's outing, Mona Lisa's Revenge. To spoiler you less than the trailer does: Clyde, the rebellious one of Sarah Jane's kid sidekicks, is suddenly revealed to have always been a gifted artist. So much so that he has won a competition (with some really bad graffiti-style girls-with-guns work) and the class have been invited to see the unveiling of the Mona Lisa, on its first loan outside the Louvre. A loan to a gallery run by a man who was apparently barred from the Louvre for his obsession with the Mona Lisa, so that obviously makes perfect sense. Except, oh noes, the Mona Lisa has come to life! Where she is played by someone who looks nothing like the Mona Lisa, can't act, and has apparently been chosen just because somebody thought it would be jolly funny if for no apparent reason, the Mona Lisa had a Northern accent. Now, all of this is pretty poor in and of itself. But what makes it really special is that the Mona Lisa has already been key to a Doctor Who story. Not some pissy little book or audio or whatever, either, but one of the best stories in the original series' TV history, the Douglas Adams/Tom Baker/Lalla Ward classic City of Death. Ford is writing for a spin-off while either never having seen this story, being too stupid to remember it, or being arrogant enough that he thinks he can go clodhopping all over it for some cheap laughs which don't even come off.
But hey, at least he's not writing the series finale.
Oh, and while we've had occasional updates as to what original kid sidekick Maria has been up to since she moved to America, her dad, nice Alan Jackson, can now be seen as priapic, indolent English professor Matt Beer in Channel 4's so-so new comedy pilot Campus. Which is quite disturbing.

Black Plastic tonight, which is for the best as this week I have verged on the reclusive. Well, OK, there was pub quiz, and Bright Club (complete with Cockney singalong, a giant bedbug and Robin Ince being ace), and some time spent in the 41st millennium (albeit less than planned). But mainly I have been doing two things: applying for jobs, and finishing Cerebus. Now, if you don't know Cerebus, it was a comic which started back in the seventies as a parody of Barry Windsor-Smith's Conan adaptations (as loved by President Obama), the joke being that the warrior hero Cerebus was a three-foot tall talking aardvark. Except at some stage, creator Dave Sim decided that he could take this further, so he announced that there would be 300 monthly issues of this, following Cerebus' entire life (which turned out to be something like 300 years long, but we'll come to that). So first Cerebus became Prime Minister, then Pope, in two stories which at the time were probably as sophisticated as comics had ever got. Sim had his hobby horses (who doesn't?), but he was a very good writer, an even better artist, and probably the best letterer comics has ever seen. Nobody else can make dialogue ring true like Sim lettering can, which is why I'll try to keep direct quotes to a minimum here because without the lettering, they just look wrong.
And then he stripped it all back for the small-scale, domestic Jaka's Story, still reckoned by some to be the series' high-point, and certainly a beautiful, haunting story which - even in isolation - can stand comparison with the best comics has to offer on the theme of lost love, and which far outclasses the sort of middlebrow dreck on the subject that wins Bookers, Oscars &c.
And then...well, it's not entirely fair, but the quickest way to say it is that then Dave Sim got religion. Which in this case even more than most, pretty much equates to going mad. ( Read more... )
And, if nothing else, it was so gruelling that I ended up making plenty of job apps because comparatively, they'd become the displacement activity.