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

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.

So I've finally taken Foxbase Alpha out of the CD player - but only to swap in another St Etienne reissue and start reading London Belongs To Me. I vaguely recall hearing that it was the film rather than the book which inspired their song of the same name (see also 'Wuthering Heights'), but the book feels a lot like an old British film anyway, the sort of black&white minor classic BBC2 shows during the daytime. It has the same sort of narrator, wise but homely, timeless and omniscient but thoroughly rooted - "And what about Percy? After all, it was his morning as much as anybody's else. How is he getting on by now? Well, take a look in his bedroom and see for yourself."
It's also the exact sort of slice of life, state of the nation cross-section which I so despise in the modern middlebrow literary novel. And yet, somehow the distance makes that less of a problem (maybe now it's half-forgotten it has found its level). This even though being published in 1945 yet set in 1938-9 gives it the same pseudo-prescience about the war which I felt lessened Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square (and Hamilton is the closest other writer I know to Norman Collins, about whom I know nothing except that he wrote London Belongs To Me.
That's all pretty ambivalent, isn't it? And I'm not entirely sure why I'm still reading this, but I am, and fairly certain I'm going to read all 700 plus pages, and I think a lot of that is just down to that narratorial voice, and how well it suits London, and how if you can get London right I'll forgive an awful lot else.
(Timing may have helped too, in that it starts at Christmas. In December I kept reading things which I hadn't realised finished at Christmas - from Ian Hunter's Diary of a Rock'n'Roll Star to Batman: The Resurrection of R'as al Ghul and X-Men: Days Of Future Past. Now, another timely choice)

On the whole, it's been a gentle week so far - a milkshake under the Angel's wings, slow progresses through the ice and snow. I missed frolics in the snow yesterday because I assumed there'd be at least another day of it (slightly mistaken, but nevermind, eh?) and because I had a prior appointment for a Doctor Who binge. My route did take me through Clissold Park, though, and I can only assume that young people in Stoke Newington don't play enough violent computer games, because their aim with snowballs is dreadful. But, Doctor Who. In reverse order of merit:
Timelash: any arse who says that the new series isn't as good as the old should be forced to watch this, repeatedly, until they admit the error of their ways. Technobabble, crappy sets, an incoherent plot, risible monsters...Paul Darrow hamming it up is about the only thing which salvages matters, because Colin Baker is trying his best but there's really not much to work with. DVD also features a Making Of in which all the survivors blame the producer and director, who are safely dead, which is cowardly but fun.
The Sontaran Experiment: Tom Baker, Sarah Jane (in a less stylish wardrobe than she now boasts) and hopeless buffoon Harry Sullivan fall down holes and are pursued by a camp robot for two episodes. It was originally meant to be six. Dear heavens. The Sontarans here are not so much a warrior race as galactic bureaucrats (they can't invade without a proper risk assessment). They're not as short as nowadays, but the faces are even sillier.
An Unearthly Child: the unaired pilot version of the very first episode. This is where it all began and the focus on the human characters is closer to the new series than a lot of what came in between. Parts of it still send shivers up the spine, and not just from nostalgia.
City of Death: Tom Baker and Mrs Richard Dawkins charge around Paris at the show's peak, even if the plot by Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth, doesn't make a lick of sense. The DVD also has a fly-on-the-wall documentary following Sardoth, second-to-last of the Jagaroth, as he tries to make a life for himself in the British countryside ("EU rules oblige the government to give Sardoth an enormous house"). It's funny, but not quite as funny as Douglas Adams' script for the episode proper.

Brilliant if too-short interview with Andy Serkis. Apparently method posture for his portrayal of Ian Dury has left him with a "massive weird muscle" in his groin, and Ian's widow and son both responded to early drafts with "He's so much darker, so much more of a cvnt than this". For all that rock biopics tend to disappoint me (so samey), I may make an exception here.

Stringer Bell is going to be in Branagh's Thor film. And we already knew Titus Pullo was involved, probably as Volstagg. I SAY THEE YAY. And speaking of things HBO, while the final Generation Kill did editorialise a little, while I don't think it's ever going to be as beloved as The Wire, that was an extremely good series - maybe even more so than The Wire it did a brilliant job of humanising the characters you hated, showing why they were such utter dicks, with even Godfather getting his moment at the end.

To my amazement, the proposed internet laws in the Queen's Speech were even worse than expected. If you've not been keeping up with the minutiae: the Government commissioned a report, Digital Britain, on how to reconcile the interests of the creative industries with those of net users. This report said that while unlicensed file-sharing was indeed rather naughty, internet disconnection was too draconian a penalty even for the guilty, never mind how many innocents would also be punished (Mum and Dad for the kids' filesharing, or a whole town for one illicit movie). So obviously, because we know how the government regards facts as dangerously subversive (just ask Professor Nutt), Peter Mandelson elbowed the relevant minister out of the spotlight, countermanded the report his own government had commissioned (they obviously didn't appoint a tame enough investigator, Hutton must have been busy), and countermanded anything sensible in it to put three-strikes disconnection back on the agenda. And, we now learn, so much more.
This in a world where Rupert Murdoch, until recently New Labour's bestest pal, talks about putting a pay wall around the websites of his various ghastly papers while stealing content from Edgar Wright. But you can bet that even if that happened two more times, even under the new rules, News International wouldn't get disconnected. In spite of how even musicians who don't make nearly as much money as they should would rather be ripped off online than live in a country which thinks disconnection is acceptable. The only consolation is that the relevant bill is profoundly unlikely to make it through before Goooooordon Brooown loses the next election. Not that I expect the other flavour of scum to propose anything better, you understand, but sometimes delay is the best you can hope for. After all, the horse might talk.

The Black Casebook collects a dozen strange Batman stories from 1951-1964, which is the period when the comic was as stupid as the old Adam West TV series, but without having to worry about the limited budget. So, Batman could be turned into a hulking monster, or find himself on an alien world called Zur-En-Arrh - which, if you've read Grant Morrison's run on the character, should explain why this collection has been put out, and why I was reading it. He contributes an introduction (although one which disagrees in some respects with the contents - he mentions 'The Rainbow Batman' when the book instead has 'The Rainbow Creature'. All the campy old elements are here - Bat-Mite and Ace the Bat-Hound - and by no sane standard are the stories or the art any good. Even the ideas are not so much "mad, brilliant ideas" as half-formed and hurries, born of desperation. Mainly it serves as a testament to Morrison's own talents, going back over the history of Batman and managing to find resonance even in these stupidest of stories which most modern writers would prefer to forget about.
Also, I know it's hardly novel to suggest Batman and Robin came across as a bit gay back in the day, but this book opens with 'A Partner For Batman' where you really can't avoid it. Robin has broken his leg just as Batman is about to train up a new Batman-type for an unnamed European country. Except Robin is convinced this is just a cover story and Batman wants to drop him in favour of Wingman! Cue such lines as, while Batman carries the injured Robin like a bride, "Batman's doing his best to sound gay. But I can tell his heart isn't in it!". And, from one onlooker, "A man is better than a kid any day!". Poor discarded twink.

Haven't had the energy or the funds to be out and about so much this week; even daytime wanders have been a bit sub-optimal, like yesterday when Highbury was deserted and instead of relishing this, I just wondered if it was anything to do with how very tentacly those red-leaved plants look once the leaves are finally gone. But, this just makes me look forward to tonight's Black Plastic all the more. Makes the weekend feel like a weekend, something which can rather slide when one is away from the habit of the working week.

Is anybody aware of any musicians making public complaint or comment about Spotify? They're all happy to sound off for or against filesharing, after all, and any of the complaints about filesharing (except, obviously, 'I'm not getting paid') surely apply to Spotify too. Plus, the obvious extra one of the ads - yesterday I realised that I should probably have heard Public Image Limited's Metal Box and used Spotify to rectify the situation, but the main result was that I have the Ladyhawke song from that beer ad stuck in my head. Now, OK, complaining about Spotify which *is* paying would be biting the hand that feeds...but since when were pop stars averse to doing that? Patrick Wolf slags off MP3s while expecting fans to invest in his new album in exchange for an MP3 copy of it. And admittedly he's a bit of a berk these days, but he's hardly alone in that. I might just have missed the relevant quotes, though it seems like something CMU would cover - if so, please enlighten me. Vague recollections are as welcome as links.

Saw a fashionable young persons' band play their first show outside North America last night, but in spite of the self-parodically indie name (or is it knowingly self-parodically indie? Who can keep track anymore) I rather enjoyed Natalie Portman's Shaved Head. Bouncy electro-indie, fun rather than trying to be cool, and an audience to match. And the great thing about the Flowerpot is that if you're not a fashionable young person who wants to be grooving down the front, you can still find a seat with a decent view. Back of the net.

The main reason I took any notice of Kim Stanley Robinson asking why no science fiction has won the Booker was the letter he quotes from Virginia Woolf to Olaf Stapledon, in which she quite correctly admits "you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you - as one does those who reach what one has aimed at". Robinson himself has never been much to my taste, and none of the SF novels he advocates as worthy Booker winners are ones I've read, though I could certainly name a few other candidates. Beyond that, he wasn't saying anything new, and seemed to have missed the point that whatever its original intent, the Booker is a prize for middlebrow book-group literary fiction, which is a genre like any other - even to the extent of very occasionally throwing up a good book (The Line of Beauty may be Alan Hollinghurst's weakest but it's still well worth a read, sub-Brideshead TV adaptation notwithstanding). Even when Booker judge John Mullan's rebuttal presented himself as a convenient example of a species of straw man we might have hoped extinct, bullish about his ignorance rather than simply complacent (he 'said that he "was not aware of science fiction," arguing that science fiction has become a "self-enclosed world...it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other." Must have missed the bit where it's all over the cinema and TV screens, but then he probably still believes neither of those is a proper artform either, the dessicated fool)...well, his loss. But the point where I finally got annoyed was when another judge, Lucasta Miller, said in the October 10th 'Week in Books' feature puzzlingly absent from the archive that "When I reread the six, the one I felt had the highest chance of still being read in 100 years time was Summertime by Coetzee...In the event, the majority vote did not go to the book most likely to be read in the far future".
It says so much that a Booker judge, even one less wilfully stupid than Mullan, could consider a hundred years hence "the far future". Even if we assume - as literary fiction by default assumes - that things carry on much as before, that the coming century brings no ascent into posthumanity, then there are children alive today who will be around then. Only if we take the line - but this is again the province of science fiction - that catastrophe is coming, can we expect everyone now living to be dead then.
This is the smallness of scale, the littleness of thought, which defines modern literary fiction. People who would kill their own children to be Woolf but don't even see that Woolf knew she was no Stapledon. I've long said that in the 21st century, you can only write historical fiction or science fiction, because by the time your book hits the presses, 'now' is over. Things change too fast. The Booker shortlist, if nothing else, has confirmed my point for me.
(Yes, I know that's a slight oversimplification - you can write historical science fiction, such as Arthur C Clarke's wonderful The Fountains of Paradise, which I'm reading at the moment. Slipping between a thinly-veiled Sri Lanka two millennia past and a hundred years hence, evocative and visionary, it's exactly the sort of thing the Booker would have loved if it had only limited its scope and intelligence a little)

Why must reality spoil my fun? Right, you know that berk in the ads saying "with free texts for life, I'd start a superband?" - even aside from how few texts it really takes to start a band, he looks so slappable that you're pretty damn sure any band he starts would suck, aren't you? Last night I finally formulated exactly what manner of suck - I thought it would be Coldplay meets the Chilli Peppers, and they'd do at least one Bob Marley cover. Except once I got home I saw that he's now a TV ad as well as a poster, so now you can hear his 'superband' and they're not even that interesting, just ditchwater-dull indie. Bah humbug.

Whatever David Simon made after The Wire was probably always destined to be a disappointment because frankly, where do you go from there? Usain Bolt's one thing, but in the arts it's pretty hard to beat your own world record. Generation Kill is, by any sane standards, very good. But The Wire means David Simon is now judged by insane standards. Clearly I am going to keep watching GK, and I have every expectation that it will grow on me. But on some level I can't help feeling that I've seen it before. The invasion of Iraq is not an unexamined, forgotten story in the way the decline of America's inner cities is, and a lot of the analyses of the US Marines (the system's inefficiencies mean that even those with the best intentions find themselves frustrated) seem familiar from Baltimore PD. So far, the closest thing to a McNulty seems to be Ziggy from Season 2, and against The Wire's studied impenetrability, having a reporter embedded with the unit seems a little easy, even if he is played by Tobias Beecher from Oz.

True Blood, on the other hand, is better than its creator's last work, Six Feet Under, because True Blood isn't under the misapprehension that it's smart. Honest trash I can handle, it's middlebrow self-satisfaction that gets my back up. The basic concept - with a blood substitute synthesized, vampires can come out of hiding - is not terribly original, some of the characters are pretty annoying, and so far Anna Paquin's psychic powers seem to vary more in accord with plot demands than any internal logic. It could all easily go a bit Heroes if the bad bits start to outweigh the good. But, so far, I'm inclined to keep watching. Just so long as it doesn't go all hugging'n'learning like 6FU.

What Darwin Didn't Know has now, alas, fallen off iPlayer, but if it comes round again as BBC4 documentaries tend to, it's well worth a look. I've been a fan of Armand Marie Leroi since his book and series on mutants, but even aside from his spookily charismatic presenting this is quite a powerful show. That title is a cunning bait for creationists, even more so for the people who maybe haven't fallen for the whole lie but who (as with global warming) have been misled by the airtime the morons and liars still get into believing that maybe there remain doubts. And Leroi goes into unsparing detail about everything Darwin didn't know, guessed, got wrong. Except - Darwin admitted as much himself. And then we go through the history of the theory of evolution up to the present day, drawing in figures familiar (Mendel, Crick & Watson) and less so who filled in the gaps, revised the details, pushed the theory forward. Exactly as Darwin hoped would happen. Because The Origin of Species is not an alternative to the Bible, because the scientific method (done right, at least) is not about clinging to a different, slightly less old book as an equally infallible account of life. The argument between creationism and evolution is not simply a choice of two prophets, two books - it's about totally different approaches, a truth which claims to be definitive versus one which knows it's always provisional and is forever, yes, evolving.

I didn't do that 'what are people's misconceptions about me' meme a couple of weeks back, because for the most part: I'm not going to know them; or correcting them would make me sound like a tool; or correcting them would be strategically mistaken. But, I imagine it might surprise people that 'til xandratheblue showed me a couple last night, I'd never seen an episode of The Twilight Zone. 'Treehouse of Horror' and other pastiches, sure, plus more 2000AD Future Shocks than I care to number. Even a couple of episodes of the godawful revival of the rip-off Outer Limits (yeah, you may control the horizontal and the vertical - but I control the Off switch, suckers). I was on to 'The Eye of the Beholder''s twist within five minutes - because I've grown up with all those twist endings The Twilight Zone helped inspire - but it was still brilliantly executed, for the most part; the budget must have been tiny but the script and the camerawork meant that didn't matter. Just a shame they let in touches of 1984 melodrama when they could have kept the world looking exactly like USA 1960 except for that one little detail. But the McCarthyite paranoia of 'The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street' was simply perfect. Must investigate further, so thank heavens for the internet, eh?

Lots of spiders about this Autumn, apparently. "Just leave them alone and they will leave you alone", says John Partridge of the British Arachnological Society. So, if I climb through a stranger's window and then run around their house, or simply lurk in a corner looking sinister, I am leaving that person alone, am I?

Into Central on Wednesday, where under louring skies I realise this is my first time out since The London Paper folded, so as people trudge past me with their freesheets, they're all reading the same one. The one which, of the two rags (both fairly poor, obviously) takes the markedly more negative approach. And even if the cheerier one had triumphed, that uniformity would have felt like a tiny tick forward on the Doomsday Clock (exliontamer suggests that anything can seem apocalyptic if the headphones soundtrack it that way, but I was only listening to the new Madness). I'm headed for Pure Groove, allegedly a record shop but in fact a cafe/bar which also sells a bit of music - like so many artists, they've clearly realised that the sale of physical copies of music is not where the money lies anymore. The set-up is fairly Nathan Barley, especially the support act (transvestite riot grrrl would have been a brilliant idea, 15 years ago), but I'm there for Gyratory System who have no apparent connection to all this - or indeed, to any other context of which I'm aware. I don't know whether nobody else makes stuff like this, or whether it's just that I don't hear it, but it's an utterly new sound to me. The first track is the best bits of Spirtualized without Jason Pierce whinging over the top; the second sounds like some funky seventies film themes remixed without the kitschiness that usually entails; the third mixes bits of both and then somehow sounds vaguely Egyptian too. Great stuff.

One side effect of the banking crisis, and the banks' refusal to mend their ways even when underpinned by our money, and the government's refusal to make them, is that now when you get a mail like this:
Dear Friend

I am Garry Loopy,Manager Bank of scotland.A muitinational company opted an overdraft from our bank and was over invoiced with six million pounds so i wish to transfer the funds to your account for both of us.
write me via: garyc1908@live.com. for details

Best regrad.
gary loopy
...it no longer seems that implausible that the muppet running a major bank might a) have English of that standard and b) regard this as sound banking practice.

Back from a weekend in Bath amongst the young people and old buildings; we were staying in Hannah More's old digs and I can't imagine a Puritan would approve of the new tenants. I'd been to Bath before, but not for well over a decade, probably getting on for two, and the first thing that hit me now was, this is like someone took a cutting of the streets around Regent's Park, and then found a fertile spot for them to grow without competition. Quite by chance, the Simon Napier-Bell book I was reading on the bus back confirmed that yes, they were both by Beau Nash - so it turns out I can recognise an architect's work without even knowing who he is [edit: or not; see comments]. See, another talent which ought to have employers fighting for me [oh, the bitter irony]. Anyway, most cities are just aspects of London run riot; Paris, for instance, peppers a few London monuments afflicted with gigantism over the general vibe of Euston and Edgware Roads. Bath, on the other hand, chose pretty areas and grew them well. The Parade Ground takes the spirit of London's private squares and applies its definition of 'resident' a little more generously. The place does have a lot of tourists, but not so much so that it doesn't feel like it has a life of its own. And while it's tempting to mock the local accent, one could easily say the same of Landan's, innit? I like Bath. I could see myself living there, if I were older, and richer, and there are few enough places past village size where I can say that.
Of course, there is that one tediously polite fly in Bath's ointment: Jane sodding Austen*. But walking past a museum outside which a disturbingly jolly man waved his stick at us, I worked out the solution. My problem was always that Austen wrote comedies in which a likable character is compromised by dullards, rather than tragedies in which this happens, or comedies in which the protagonist triumphs. The best model for the latter being, American film comedies. You know, Knightly standing in for the Principal, Dean or other stick-in-the-mud who gets taken down. As such, I know what needs to be done: National Lampoon's Emma. Starring Will Ferrell. As Emma.

*"``You say I must familiarise my mind with the fact that "Miss Austen is not a poetess, has no ``sentiment''" (you scornfully enclose the word in inverted commas), "has no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasm of poetry"; and then you add, I must "learn to acknowledge her as one of the greatest artists, of the greatest painters of human character, and one of the writers with the nicest sense of means to an end that ever lived".
The last point only will I ever acknowledge. ... Miss Austen being, as you say, without "sentiment", without poetry, maybe is sensible (more real than true), but she cannot be great.''" - Charlotte Bronte

So if it's scattered showers on St Swithin's Day, does that mean it'll rain for some of the next 40 days, but not all? Cheers, Swithin. That's really useful. You berk.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen lacks some of the dynamism of the first film. Those wonderful, protean fights, where transformation became a kind of martial art in itself, have given way to a more old-school model where a vehicle turns into a robot and then hits stuff. Nor does it have the emotional heft of the old stories - there's a thing happens here which also happened in the animated movie, and this time it didn't make me cry. Plus, it probably didn't help that instead of seeing it on the biggest screen in Leicester Square with the hall full of fans, I was in a sparsel-populated (availability 'few', indeed!) Screen 8 at Wood Green Cineworld.
You could, if you wished, read a political message into it - especially given the guy who wants America to hang its allies out to dry is called Galloway. Frankly, I don't think going down that road would be very productive. But, it has more robots. Bigger robots. And they hit each other lots. And have more guns. And more OTT dialogue. And fight some army hardware too. And most of the 'human' segments of the plot aim for comedy but come straight out the other side at 'lunacy'. It riffs on other films, but only big ones - Titanic, Indiana Jones (must be odd for Shia), Weird Science. The whole thing, while not quite as deranged as some reviews had me hoping, appears to be the work of a hormonall-unbalanced 12-year old boy somehow given access to the best noughties CGI and the US military have to offer. Which means that, fundamentally, it kicks arse. On the big screen, that is - I imagine it would be utter nonsense on a TV or laptop.

Finally seen No Country For Old Men and...well, OK, it's not actively awful like most films which win loads of Oscars lately, but I don't quite understand the fuss. But then, The Big Lebowski aside, I never did quite get the Coens - they make films I watch once and enjoy, but then feel no urge ever to revisit. I will concede that, in Anton Chigurh, the film has one mesmerising performance, and that its reluctance to go for one of the standard thriller resolutions is commendable. I'll further admit that their sense of whimsy does a lot to leaven the relentless, slightly monotonous bleakness which put me off Cormac McCarthy when I tried to read another of his - this is as much a film about bad service and dumb questions as heists gone wrong. But at no stage was I either as gripped, or as amused, as I was watching Psychoville. At no stage did I find myself thinking that yes, this is what film-making is about, which I felt plenty during last week's Ghostbusters marathon (and how had I never twigged before that the Warden from Oz = Winston the black Ghostbuster, aka Ernie Hudson?).
Also: while finding that No Country For Old Men link above, I learned that next year will see a Clash of the Titans remake. As much as I hate moaning about remakes - so predictable, so lacking in historical sense, so selective in its examples - I do feel fairly confident that this one deserves to be stopped by rampaging stop-motion monsters.

Michael Moorcock interview in which we learn that he doesn't read SF, and feels something of the same rage towards the steampunk he helped birth as his mate Alan Moore does towards the grim'n'gritty trend in comics. Bless the old curmudgeon. If nothing else it got me to dig out some more of his End of Time stories - possibly my favourite of his work, given they concern near-omnipotent immortals heavily inspired by the 1890s, who live out Earth's twilight in a round of parties and fads. My people, in other words.

I've already bemoaned the cancellation of Captain Britain and MI:13, but the new issue suggests that it's not even going to go out with its standards intact. By which I mean no slur on the writing or the art, but someone in lettering and/or editorial has let through a 'your' for a 'you're', a 'corps' for 'corpse' and a couple of other, lesser infelicities. Poor show. Phonogram, on the other hand, came through with my favourite issue so far of the second series, because after sweet little Penny and normal Marc, now we have an issue devoted to the first series' Emily Aster, a vain, damaged and in many ways quite annoying young woman. ie, just the kind of person who it's great to have around because she keeps you on your toes - and doubly so in fiction where she's can't really cut loose on you. I'm also left intrigued as to whether, for instance, we'll ever find out what that townie girl was doing at an indie night like Never On A Sunday. Although, I do slightly dispute Emily's test for whether a club's indie (is she more likely to hear a record which sold eight copies in 1977 than whatever's Number One now?). The rules are: if the flyer lists bands - whatever those bands are - then it's an indie club. If it lists DJs, it's a dance club. And if it lists drinks promotions, it's a pop club.

So we're sending two Nazis to Europe. On the plus side, at least the christians don't have any seats - though aren't there some still to declare? That would put the sour cherry on the carrot cake and no mistake. And I see this news just after reading the Captain Britain and MI13 annual. This being the best new superhero comic in years, one which took a character even Alan Moore couldn't make sing, and made him into the national icon he always should have been, our own Captain America as opposed to a cheap knock-off. The series hit around the same time as Garth Ennis' Dan Dare reboot, and they shared an attempt to build a sense of a British patriotism which was strong and unashamed, but which gave no quarter to the racist scum who profane the flag and the history they so tattily invoke. And the annual? Well, that's the first issue to come out since the news that Captain Britain and MI13 is cancelled. There's just not enough of a market for it. And as above, so below. It's not that I feel any shame over how this will make us look in Europe's eyes, you understand - enough other countries are sending their own fascists, and as per last century, I'm confident that ours are hardly the biggest threat of the bunch. Besides which, the European Parliament is a bad joke in the first place. I'm more embarrassed over how this makes us look to ourselves, how much it exacerbates the national mood of bemused decline. Hopefully, it'll at least be enough of a wake-up call to improve matters, but it could as easily be another step down that sorry road. In the meantime, yesterday's jokes about "ask David to bring The Final Solution" (which worked better verbally, italics and capitals being silent) and the unicorn lynching seem slightly less amusing.

Othergates:
I don't normally mind waits at the doctor's; in accord with Sarll's First Rule, I always have plenty to read about my person. Except my surgery has now installed a TV broadcasting inane health programming, noisily. Desist!
Unusually old-school Stay Beautiful this weekend, both in terms of those attending, and in not having a live act. "This is how we used to do it in the olden days!", I tell bemused youngsters for whom the night has only ever been at the Purple Turtle. The playlist is less old-school, which is a shame as such a direction might have saved me from accidentally dancing to La Roux.
Two Grant Morrison comics out last week, and while Batman & Robin was a great, straightforward superhero story with art by the ever-impressive Frank Quitely, it wasn't a patch on the glorious, tragic, yearning final issue of Seaguy's second act. Guess which one sells about ten times as much as the other?