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

Don't seem to be sleeping much at the moment - and yet, for the most part, I'm not feeling bad on it. Although that said, if you see me dozing off at the Luxembourg show tonight, don't gloat about it, eh?

Although I like the 'above the pavement, the lawn' quality of grassing over Trafalgar Square - and it trounces much of what trades as either art or protest these days - they didn't get it quite right. Obviously it would never look as striking once it was obscured by people, but to really catch the mind they should have gone past the fountains, just as virtual reality has to really wrap around past the obvious limits of the human field of vision.

It was irksome that lately Pretty In Pink and The Beautiful & Damned seemed to have synchronised their monthly cycles, but on top of that, this Thursday gone their guiding lights both bowed out - Sean departing Pretty In Pink for the USA, Dickon B&D for other projects. I would have liked to be able to say my goodbyes to both, but realised early on that if I tried to do that I'd do neither of them justice. I don't know how PiP went, but B&D was full and fun enough that I never had time to worry I might be missing out. And that's the main thing, isn't it?

Iain M Banks has written another Culture book. And it's a mammoth one, with appendices and everything. GET IN!

Harlan Ellison - perhaps the only man in the world who can get away with calling Grant Morrison Jim Morrison and still have my respect.

The Cat Returns is the first non-Miyazaki Ghibli film I've seen (well, as far as I recall - it's quite possible some of the strange anime I half-remember from childhood afternoons was theirs). And this means that for most of the film I'm thinking, well, that was pretty good, but Miyazaki would have done it so much better. The way they move, the faces, nothing is quite in that perfect pitch he almost always manages. The lead has, I suppose, a certain similarity to the girl in his one mis-step, Spirited Away, in that she's far too much the whiny victim compared to Miyazaki's normal protagonists. And the plot...it feels too much like a dream, or an old fable, and these are subtly different forms to film, where the same structures will not suffice.
But by the end, these objections fall away - in part because the film seems to be getting the hang of itself more, but also because its charms are taking effect, and I realise that if it's not Miyazaki, it's still better than almost anyone else.

When I'm objecting to censorship demands made by scum, representatives of the Lost Left like to ask "Ah*, but what if there were a work of art which went against *your* values like that?" And I always say to them, well, there are plenty, none of which I want banned, and some of which are even really good. There are beautiful passages in the King James Bible, for instance (always helps to have Shakespeare on the translation team), and Hero may be a propaganda film for a vile state, but it's also a stunning piece of cinema. The film's message is that China's unity is paramount - there is a subtlety in how characters come to realise this, true, but its nonetheless made explicit that this excuses all manner of deaths and oppressions for the supposed Greater Good. And yet - the point may be vile, but it is never made artlessly. Within the film, it works. That may be a bubble world, a thought experiment which doesn't map on to the real world, but considered as art, it doesn't matter. The Chinese government and military approved of this film enough that it has 18,000 soldiers as extras - but considered as art, the main thing is that given they're playing soldiers (albeit of a much earlier era), this makes for some absolutely stunning massed scenes. And the smaller fights...you know how everyone got excited about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon even though the fight scenes had some really ropy effects? These are the fights those fights dream about being. They're jaw-dropping, they express character perfectly, and above all they are things of utter beauty.
So yes, it's poison. But art can be poison sometimes and still be wonderful.

Hoorah! Grant Morrison's Batman run has resumed! Boo! It's illustrated prose, and illustrated at that by some obviously computer-generated-in-a-really-nineties-way McKean wannabe. There are some great ideas in this tale of how the Joker's periodic self-reinventions work (and they have something to say about the world beyond the Batman and the Joker, which is where Alan Moore always says 'The Killing Joke' failed). But they would all have been much better expressed as, you know, a *comic*. And I've not seen Batman look less threatening since he was being played by George Clooney (who I still think, tragically, could now make a great Batman but will never get a second chance).

*Yes, delivered in the tones of Stewart Lee's Jesus. How did you guess?