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

Harold and Kumar Get The Munchies is not only a very funny film; it has more to say about race in America than all that Oscar-winning dreck like Monster's Ball and Crash could even dream of.

Went to see the Cuming Museum's exhibition of painter-magician Austin Osman Spare's work last week, and very good it was too; it's finished now, but here's Alan Moore with his thoughts and a brief tour. A slight trek, but aside from finally getting an excuse to use the Waterloo & City line on my return, it was more powerful seeing Spare's work on his old turf than it would have been in the centre, more in keeping with how he exhibited during his life (in local pubs, for the most part). It makes sense that I heard about him mainly through comics - Moore and rival writer-magus Grant Morrison are both enthusiasts - because most of the things his art reminded me of were comics art. The self-portraits reminded me of Glenn Fabry, the pencils of Dave McKean as much as Aubrey Beardsley, the most deeply spiralling magical pieces of Billy the Sink if he had more respect for anatomy. And Spare's vision of the collective unconscious as landscapes made of faces...it was a little bit Source Wall, and even more the garden of the shamans from The Authority. Two pieces particularly wowed me - L'Apres Midi d'un Faune, which I think was done without taking the pencil of the page, and looked to me less like a faun than a satyr or maybe Machen's terrifying Pan, and The Evolution of the Human Race*, a still image which somehow evokes the vertiginous quality of deep time.

Other than that, a quiet weekend; it's hardly been the weather to encourage much in the way of Outside. But of course I made it along to angelv's apparently, regrettably final Don't Stop Moving for pop galore. If this really is the end, it will be missed.

*Speaking of evolution, I loved the way David Attenborough's First Life packed the whole story of vertebrates into its last five minutes. And pointed out that the way insects come together into colonies, or superorganisms, is basically the same process which first saw cells aggregating into multicellular life. But in particular, the section on eyes - ranging from the adorable Cambrian sea creature which had five, to trilobites with crystal lenses - should be injected directly into the brain of every creationist moron who says "What about the eye, eh?" and then thinks they've won.

Unsurprisingly, I liked Steven Moffat's take on Sherlock Holmes quite a lot. Not least because this was essentially Holmes as the Doctor, except ruder. But then that makes perfect sense given Holmes was inspired by Doyle teaming up with the Doctor, and/or teamed up with the Doctor himself, depending which book you believe. The Holmes-vision in particular was very reminiscent of the Doctor-vision we saw in The Eleventh Hour (and which was then quietly dropped even though Confidential suggested it would be a Thing). The modernisation was a smart move, so much better than another take on the character reduced to yet another costume drama, yet another pale shadow of Jeremy Brett - although of course you can't have a modern Holmes in a modern London without it also being an alternate world story, because Baker Street 2010 wouldn't be anything like the same without a Victorian Holmes having been. The only failure of modernisation I spotted was the first appearance of Holmes; yes, the corpse-beating scene was great, but a century on, with results from the Knoxville body farm &c to consider, it wouldn't be necessary. There were other problems: ( spoilers ) Not perfect, then - but still very good. Though whether the other writers will keep up the same standard remains to be seen, especially when one of them made his last screenwriting appearance with 'Victory of the Daleks'.

A reasonably quiet weekend, spent largely watching films (of which more later in the week) except for Saturday when there were two parties. A situation which can often end in tears, or at least unconsciousness, but fortunately I fell asleep in the kitchen at the one where I knew almost everyone, so they're used to me. Yes, I really am that classy.

Read Si'mon' Spurrier's Contract last week, with high expectations; alongside al_ewing, Spurrier is the best of the recent crop of 2000AD writers, which is no slight praise. And it's by no means a bad read - well, it's a 'bad' read in the moral sense, because it left me stood in Poundland thinking 'you know, you could get everything you needed to torture someone in here, and still have change from a tenner' - but it does suffer from one of the characteristic problems of novels by comics writers. Not the having seen it all before - yes, Spurrier has had a protagonist with the surname Point before, yes, the amoral lead is his thing, but those are all fine to revisit, and I wasn't left with the feeling of repetition for the prose audience which I got from, say, the first half of Neil Gaiman's American Gods. The problem is more...what to call it? 'Over-concentration', perhaps. Because comics writers are so used to conveying everything in a couple of lines per panel, and leaving the rest to the artist, once *everything* is filtered through a first person narrator, the characterisation can be almost too strong. It's a similar situation when a pop lyricist - or a good one, anyway - writes a book. Nick Cave's debut was excellent, but he was so used to fitting epics into four or five minutes of song that, given hundreds of pages, he produced something where the same density, over a greater length, was almost too much. It makes you realise how easy people who only ever write extended prose have it.

There's a trick which I think Art Brut began to popularise, and which several bands have taken up recently, of giving songs the same names as songs which already exist, without them being remotely the same songs. Not necessarily as diss or homage, just...liking the title. And normally I rather enjoy it, but on the new Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan album, they come a cropper. Because when I saw 'Come Undone' and 'Time of the Season' on the tracklisting, I thought, I really want to hear Isobel and Mark cover those songs. Maybe that's the problem, because I never for a moment thought the Art Brut album was going to include a M/A/R/R/S cover, or that the Indelicates album would have them doing the Stones.

Saw The Hold Steady on Tuesday. The last big, current band I wanted to see and hadn't. And they did not disappoint me. OK, so they didn't play 'Soft In The Center', or 'Your Little Hoodrat Friend', or even 'Killer Parties' (which I was sure would be the encore), but then it's not like they played a short set, or any duds - they just have too many brilliant songs to fit them all in. On stage, they're an object lesson in how things which shouldn't work, sometimes do. Craig Finn holds all the attention, and Craig Finn is without doubt the least cool man I have ever seen fronting a band. Hell, even just in an indie *audience*, he would be noticeably one of the less cool ones. And he flaps his arms about and overacts double-takes during the bits where he's not singing and does spiels about how great it is to see "real people in a real room having a beer, not on Myspace or the messageboards" which from anyone else would have me cringing. And yet, it works. You know when parents tell kids that all you really need to do to be accepted is believe in yourself? And every kid who isn't incredibly stupid wonders how the parents have forgotten so much about the world as to think that, because while belief matters, belief won't cover everything? Well, turns out that if you believe as hard as Craig Finn, it is enough. Literally, magical.
(Speaking of magic - Alan Moore fans may be aware that he worships the serpent god Glycon, in large part because Glycon was comprehensively discredited centuries ago. I didn't know much more than that, here's an essay Moore wrote about Glycon a few years ago, and it turns out that Glycon was conceived by the False Prophet Alexander, "a plausible and gifted but amoral fraud". My new second favourite classical namesake)

Wristcutters - A Love Story is almost a parody of US indie cinema. Shannyn Sossamon, Tom Waits and a bunch of HBO and Arrested Development alumni are suicides trapped in an afterlife which is the same as life, except slightly worse - dead end jobs, broken-down cars, and an inability to smile (though wry half-smiles seem to be fine). And yet it's actually rather lovely - both smart and sweet, in the way that so many of those films try so very hard to be and don't manage.

My hopes were, in all honesty, not high for Are Friends Eclectic? on Friday. It was being held at the Cross Kings (of 'rapey murals' fame) and I've been suspicious of the word 'eclectic' in club names ever since I saw the press for a night which was called simply Eclectic, on the grounds that it played all the different subgenres of drum'n'bass. But xandratheblue and retro_geek were DJing within an hour's walk of mine so it would have been churlish not to give it a try, and I'm very glad I did. With the exception of one DJ who seemed intent only on playing fashionable young people's music in remixes which removed all the good bits (why does a version of Wiley's 'Take That' without the buzzing noise even exist?) and had the treble up too high, the music was a good selection, and there were soon enough people in to obscure the walls. Well, except the one which had anime projected on it, that was fine, especially the one about the flying turtle rescuing its friends from inside a giant stone turtle on some island with an ancient turtle civilisation. Yeah, I know it's a bit of a hackneyed plot but they did it with charm. Hightlights included:
exliontamer doing the best gun action I have ever seen to MIA's 'Paper Planes'.
augstone hanging himself from the ceiling with his feather boa during 'She's Lost Control'.
steve586 using the same feather boa for a spot of skipping, which since he's already in The 18 Carat Love Affair, and 'Skipping' is also an Associates track, set me off on the idea of him doing a comedy quest in the manner of Dave Gorman or Danny Wallace (except less sh1t) where he literally enacts other Associates song titles, by eg driving a white car in Germany or playing the spoons in the nude.
We then made the arguably ill-advised decision all to pile back to Aug's for wine, American confectionery and singalongs. cappuccino_kid was the first to leave, only to find that his door was stuck and nearly have to come back. He managed to kick it in in the end but I was concerned that, being from Belfast, reflex might then take over and he'd try to kneecap the hamster, which would be hard enough sober.
On Saturday, after four hours' sleep, I got up for what was meant to be a lovely walk in the country. Except the member of the party who had suggested this specific walk was 'ill', a story the rest of us soon began to walk. I can hardly complain that the Lea/Lee Valley doesn't even know how to spell itself when I live so close to Har(r)ing(a/e)y, but the directions we had from Waltham Cross station used terms like 'right' and 'left' in ways which didn't really fit the late Soviet concrete feel of the surrounds. Yes, once we found Waltham Abbey it was historically and architecturally lovely, if still rather too actively christian for my liking (even attempting ti claim orthodoxy for the Zodiac on the ceiling). And at first, the riverside walk seemed lovely too. But soon the Tottenham reservoirs were looming on our left (being raised, they essentially look like motorway embankments with the odd life-ring at the top); to our right, a river with no apparent life but the coots, and beyond that, decaying industry. And above us - pylons, diligently following the path. We thought we'd found some signs of rural life with the glimpse of horses ahead, but close up they had upsetting and peculiar growths, which was possibly the last straw (even the horses were out, having moldy bread instead). We bailed at Ponders End - where the only pub seemed to be a Harvester. Cultural tourism ahoy.
Then home via the library for lots of tea, and out again to see the 18 Carat Love Affair, or rather the 14.4 Carat Love Affair, as the bassist was ill (you could maybe subtract further given the fragility of other band members, but the maths would start getting dubious). They were supported by two baffling but keen Japanese bands who had very loud singers; it was perhaps because of this that Steve could barely be heard in the mix when he went for a more subtle/hungover approach. Still not a bad show, though. Headliners Black Daniel were quite something - essentially Har Mar Superstar joining the Dandy Warhols to fill in for a show the Black Eyed Peas couldn't make - but a band like that requires energy, and by this stage I had none. Home again, and bed. Where I pretty much stayed yesterday.

The weekend's viewing:
Anatomy of a Murder: Jimmy Stewart and Lee Remick star in the Murder One of its day, with a surprisingly frank treatment of rape for 1959. Coincidentally, the Saul Bass* titles were homaged in Alan Moore's 'The Anatomy Lesson', which I reread this same weekend because, in the library, I found the new Saga of the Swamp Thing hardcover which finally reprints Moore's first issue on the series, rather than starting with said 'Anatomy Lesson'. Some lovely page layouts, presumably Totleben's, but you can see why prior reprints never bothered with it.
Around The World By Zeppelin, a fabulous compilation of archive footage and diary readings telling the story of a 1930 journey which, were it fictional, would seem heavy-handed. Our protagonist - an aristocratic English journalist, junior partner to an American. They had an affair a while back, and it ended badly, but feelings remain. In Germany, there are extremist riots against reparations; in Japan, meetings hailing a new age of German-Japanese friendship. Stalin blusters as they fly over the endless wastes of Russia, and they are feared lost after a great storm over the Pacific. Back in the US, alive, the men ignore the Midwest passing beneath them, too obsessed with the novelty of being the first airborne traders in stocks and shares. Thinking about it, maybe Glen David Gold or Michael Chabon could do it justice - but they don't need to, because this film exists. Do watch it.
Sons of Anarchy, which having come from a Shield writer, now brings in a Shield actor - and it's poor compromised old Dutch, playing an ATF agent who's a lot more human than he'd like to be. Oh, this is going to be good.

*I always get Saul Bass confused with Lance Bass, the former 'N Sync member and thwarted space traveller. Checking Wikipedia to see if there's any connection, I see no sign of one, but it does claim that his mother's maiden name was Haddock. Is this true? Because Haddock marrying Bass sounds distinctly fishy.

There are plenty of films with two actors playing the same character - usually an older or a younger version of the star. But I can't think of many with four plus actors in the same part. This week, I saw two, and in both cases one of the actors sharing was Heath Ledger.
I was interested in I'm Not There even before I eventually fell for Bob Dylan as a performer rather than just a songwriter. Because biopics bore me so easily - always the same few variations on the old arc - and because this was Todd Haynes, who already did the oblique approach so well with Bowie and Iggy and the rest in Velvet Goldmine. And the two films share more than a little: the transfer of power between different avatars of Dylan reminds me of the green jewel in the earlier film; there's a journalist out to unveil origins, though here it's not the backbone of the plot; above all, there's the question of whether music can change the world, and what happens to the musician if it can't. But the big difference is that Haynes clearly never felt betrayed by Dylan like he did by Bowie. He loves all his Dylans equally - even if, like most people, I was left a little cold by the Richard Gere outlaw Dylan. The others, though...I loved having Batman and the Joker both play the same part (see, Alan? 'The Killing Joke' did have some external resonance after all), then sharing it with the Virgin Queen. And did they know when they cast this, or Bright Star, that Ben Whishaw would be playing both Dylan and Keats, that old lit-crit cliche given (rather handsome) life. So much truer than the standard biopic, and probably not even that much less factual. Though I say that as someone who knows very little about Dylan's life - just enough to wince when he buys a motorcycle.
I'm Not There was planned that way. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was not, but you'd never guess it. I have no idea what was changed in the script, but one can almost suspect that Terry Gilliam, so used to being shafted by whatever cosmic entity it is that likes messing with him, was filming in such an order that he could work around the loss of Ledger. Which would normally mean that instead Christopher Plummer would have died, or maybe Tom Waits, or the lad from Red Riding would have been eaten by foxes or something, but just this once the stupid obstacle in Gilliam's way was one that he could work around. There aren't half some queasy moments, scenes with Ledger's character that gain a whole new resonance - but always in such a way that it strengthens the film. ( spoilers ) among its many other flights of fancy. And such flights of fancy they are! I can't remember the last film I saw which was so visually rich, whether in its worlds of the imagination, or in its London. And it does have to take place in London, doesn't it? The grandest, most fabled city in the world - but also one with grabbing thugs spilling out of crappy pubs, and Homebases insisting you spend spend spend, and its perpetual building sites.
Ashes to Ashes fans should be aware that Shaz gets a small role, but the real revelation is Lily Cole. I knew she was pretty, but I'd never seen her move, or speak, and so I'd never realised she was beautiful, let alone that she could act. Which given that face, and that she's just gone up to Cambridge, seems terribly unfair, but then like the film is so intent on reminding us, the world is full of wonders.

I also saw Crank this week. There's not so much to say about that one; like Shoot 'Em Up it's the action movie distilled to its purest form and injected into your eyeball with a syringe made of guns - smarter than it lets on, while also being the best sort of big dumb fun. During its ITV transmission, there was also an ad for the ITV4 debut of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse - two hours earlier. Well done, ITV. Said trailer didn't do anything useful like inform me of a repeat, but I tracked one down and...well, when I first heard about Dollhouse I thought, hang on, isn't that basically Joe 90 - The Sexy Years? The first episode didn't convince me otherwise but, because it's Whedon, I'm persevering. Even though I realised a while back that if Buffy started now, I don't think I'd make it through the first season.

Alan Moore is launching a magazine, of all things. That Melinda Gebbie and Kevin O'Neill are contributing is no surprise, but he also has Graham Linehan, Steve Aylett and Josie Long involved.

The trailer for the remake of The Prisoner doesn't do much to change my original opinion that it's a fundamentally bad idea, even with Ian McKellen. It doesn't help that the trailer is nearly ten minutes long; trailers should not be so long that you get bored before you've even seen the show.

Though I did also find time for Popular, drunken singalongs to the best album ever and setting myself on fire, this weekend was largely occupied with the Brontosaurus Chorus video shoot. If you've ever felt that between the 28 Weeks Later scene outside the Noble, and Shaun of the Dead in Crouch End, there was too big a zombie gap, then your worries are over - shambling undeath is now available atop Crouch Hill too. The first day of Parkland Walk filming was interrupted by joggers (including Bernard Butler), dogwalkers and children who will probably be scarred for life; yesterday we were next to a soft p0rn shoot.

Spent Friday night in the Queens, which I don't recall visiting since its brief stint as the local, a stint ended when missfrost ceased to be its most local local and the centre of social gravity shifted. It hasn't changed, except that it now employs a pirate, something I mentioned just as he picked up my glass from behind. Ooops.
On Saturday, I got the train to Oxford rather than the coach, which also meant using Paddington rail station for I think the first time ever. It has a disappointing lack of bears. I was amongst the dreaming spires for a wedding attended by many people from university who were already married, draped in children or otherwise giving me the fear. What I had thought a rather over-ambitious scheme for the day in fact worked very smoothly, and the river journey in particular was perfectly English - motoring gently along the Thames, gentle meadows to the side and gentler cumulus above, plenty of cava. And, inevitably, the goth boating party coming the other way. One friend of the groom refused to believe that my flatmate could be among them - "How can they have flatmates? They're river gypsies!" West Londoners can be so entertaining. Later, I attempt to scramble up some creepers. This is not a great plan - you can trust trees, but creepers are deceptive. I fall on my arse, and am in a not inconsiderable amount of pain for the rest of proceedings, and onwards. Between this and my cowboy boots (long story, but they really were the only sensible footwear given the itinerary), on Sunday in particular I am reduced to walking at the speed most people walk at. I honestly don't know how they cope - it takes so long to get anywhere! Suddenly I understand why so many people get public transport everywhere or are simply reluctant to leave the house.
On Sunday, fugitivemotel gets his send-off. All associated parties are late to the pub in various degrees, but some other people I know have been there since mid-afternoon, so I hang with them for a bit, then manage to disperse most of them with the assertion (I can offer no sources, but still recall hearing it somewhere credible) that one major omission from Gorillas in the Mist was quite how friendly Dian Fossey got with the gorillas. This means we can get their big table. Result. And have a nice USA, fugitivemotel.

One can point to plenty of templates for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen's stitching together of different fictions into one grand tapesty - Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton series is often mentioned, or there are Kim Newman's Dracula books. In one sense it's a foolish endeavour, because back before copyright started messing intertextuality up, myths would always mingle - look at the way the Matter of Britain incorporated other chivalrous myths, previously self-sufficient characters like Lancelot being brought into Arthur's orbit. Nonetheless, I've found another work on the same theme which I'm rather enjoying, David Thomson's Suspects. Thomson is probably best known for his gleefully partial Biographical Dictionary of Film, though I only know it through the entries the Guardian sometimes runs; I was turned on to him by his experimental Orson Welles biography Rosebud, and then confirmed as a fan by The Whole Equation which explains all those bits and pieces you never quite knew you didn't know about how Hollywood works. Suspects started as an outgrowth of the Biographical Dictionary, except instead of actors and directors it addresses the characters, telling you what happened before the film starts and after the credits roll. In the interests of a coherent world, it limits itself to film noir - but Thomson defines this term pretty widely, taking it out to borders like It's A Wonderful Life and Taxi Driver which, if not canonical, become inarguable the way Thomson tells it. So in the style of a reference book, we learn how Noah Cross from Chinatown and Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond were lovers, say - and the identity of her child - and yet as it goes on it becomes clear that, non-objective as Thomson has always been, the narrator here is not Thomson, but someone involved in this noir-verse. I'm hampered by only knowing about a quarter of the films referenced, and none of them all that well, but still love it; if you're a film noir obsessive I imagine it's even better.

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?

I'm not especially into signings. I'll go along if it's a mate who might not be drawing a massive crowd, to show support, but queueing for hours just to be in the Presence...why? But, Gosh's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen signing was going to have copies of Century: 1910 weeks early, and that's another matter. Except, you could buy them in the shop, and the signing was around the corner. Well, since I was there, and my immediate agenda was to read '1910', and then read the Guide and the main bit of the paper, and since I was there, and since I could do all that reading while queueing...might as well hang around.
Two hours later, they're all read. I could make a start on the review section, but I wouldn't be doing that anyway. The question 'Why am I here?' no longer has a solid answer. I depart, and by the bus stop find that the Hawksmoor church has a deeply surreal exhibition in its basement, which I wander in perfect solitude. Alan Moore's From Hell turned me on to Hawksmoor; I feel more sense of communion with him down in that crypt than I would awkwardly saying 'Hiya!' in a crowded signing room. And then as I board the bus, a perfectly-timed text tells me there's a picnic in the park. If nothing else, the queueing means that relatively speaking, I'm one of the sober ones.
As for the new volume...well, I know there's been talk of each third of Century being a satisfying read in itself, so that the inevitable delays aren't a problem. But this is very much an opening chapter, and it's one whose animating spirit is Brecht, meaning that like him, at times it's rather heavy-handed for my tastes. But it's still Alan Moore, and it's still the League, so the intricacy of the patchwork is still staggering, the story still has more heart than it's sometimes given credit for, and the Iain Sinclair riff is absolutely hilarious - if you've read him, anyway. Whenever they turn up, I'm very much looking forward to the rest of Century, not least because the promised crossovers include Vincent Chase and David Simon's Baltimore. Speaking of Baltimore, there was a drunk perv getting thrown out of Power's on Friday who looked like an uglier Frank Sobotka, but who insisted he was a police officer. It wasn't until his attempts to taunt the bouncer expanded to include moonwalking that I realised, this must be what Michael Jackson looks like nowadays, whiter than ever (or indeed, red); minus the hat, mask and shades; and after the doctors' instructions to bulk up ahead of his London shows. I was there to see Borderville, whose singer weirdly turns out to have done the same course as me at the same college, while really reminding me of Jesse from Flipron. Extremely good band, but while they're great showmen, part of me wonders whether some of the subtlety and structure of the songs doesn't get lost live. They're also, I think, the sort of band who would benefit from a smart producer, as opposed to the sort who just spaff a load of money on one so's to have something to talk about in interviews. Other acts are Rubella (very pretty, shame about the lack of songs), and Alvarez King(?), who at least realise that they are 'freshwater fish in salt water'.