alexsarll: (default)
Just finished reading The Thin Veil of London, a book loosely concerning the great Arthur Machen, and a companion to a walk I went on a couple of Sundays back. Elements which could have felt like am-dram instead felt like they were genuinely ruffling the surface and some Thing might chance through at any moment, as we walked streets I'd never seen within ten minutes of where I've been working for two years. And Machen's grandson was there, now old enough to resemble the great man's jacket pictures. Truly an experience to treasure.
Other London adventures:
- Victoria Park, which I have passed but never entered, finally visited. Would be lovely if it didn't have so many wasps and men who think they're it.
- The Archway Tavern has now become a tiki bar, and not in the half-arsed manner one might expect - there's even an indoors water feature. Also tequila girls and bog trolls. They come with the venue. The night, being loosely glam, had attracted a bafflingly mixed crowd, including some full-on townies and what looked like US-style good old boys as well as the obvious. Most terrifying, though - one man who looked like a seventies TV presenter, and one girl wearing the classic 'sexy school uniform' look. In defiance of all laws of comedy, they didn't seem to know each other.
- I've never sat in Greenwich Park and not faced the view North before. Around the bandstand it feels like another park, less London, older. I like it.

Saw Menswear again on Friday; I say 'again', last time it was Johnny Dean and the Nuisance band, but a rose by any other name would smell as Britpop. When I wear a suit, I can even confuse other nineties indie celebrities into thinking I am him.

I was dimly aware Art Everywhere was coming, but it was very much background knowledge until I glanced at a billboard and thought, hang on, what the Hell are they trying to sell with John Martin's fire and brimstone? And they weren't; it was just saying 'Hey, look at John Martin! Isn't he good?' Second one was Samuel Palmer. I don't go to a lot of single-artist exhibitions, but I've been to see both of them. Approved.

War of the Waleses is, by its dramaturge's own admission, 'sillier and nastier' in its current version that first time out. I can see how the shorter version, with fewer actors, is much better suited to the practicalities of Fringe life, and making any play crueller about Princess Di is fine by me (the new line about her "simpering sedition" absolutely nails it), but I miss some of the Shakespeare resonances lost - especially when it comes to John Major and the vanished John Smith. The comparison of the two takes set me thinking - Major was our Yeltsin, wasn't he? By which I mean, a very long way from perfect, and you can entirely understand the pisstaking at the time, but it was a brief glimpse of doing things a slightly different way before the ancien regime reasserted itself, more dickish than before in so far as that dickishness was veiled around with a new insincerity.

I'm up to the end of Breaking Bad's third season, whose pacing and tone seemed a little off - too often the show overegged the comedy, before slipping into mawkishness when it pulled back from that. Too much old ground was re-covered in the tension between the leads. And then I saw an interview with Bryan Cranston where he claimed that other TV shows were about familiarity, about seeing the same character each week, and nobody on TV has ever changed like Walter White. And I thought, no. Absolutely take your point about most network crap, and even some very good shows, but never say never. Because Babylon 5 had Londo and G'kar, and they changed like nobody's business. So this nudged me back towards my paused rewatch of B5's second season, and I realised, it wasn't just the general principle of a character who changes: Walter is Londo. He's a proud man, feeling his time has passed, staring the end in the face. So he makes a deal with the devil and at first he's thrilled by the power, before realising that he has become something he hates, and there's no way to get off the ride. He even has a conflicted relationship with a younger sidekick possessed of a certain inherent haplessness!
Other television: Justified got a fair few articles this time around about how it deserved more attention, which is more attention that it used to get, but still not as much as it deserves. I'm intrigued by the way other characters were built up this time out, especially among the Marshals - it could almost survive without Timothy Olyphant, I think, not that I'm in any hurry to see it try. The Revenants was good, even if it did cop out a little by going to a second series WHICH HAD BETTER BLOODY ANSWER EVERYTHING. Speaking of cops, French police uniforms suck. I did love how unashamedly Gallic it was in scattering sexy superpowers around the populace. And BBC4 continues to brutally beat down every traitor who ever dissed the holy BBC. Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter as Burton and Taylor was a suitably meta final outing for their big dramas; just as Cleopatra marked the end of Hollywood's grand era, so this brought down the curtain on BBC4's days of riches (at least, until I rule the world, when the accumulated wealth of the entire Murdoch mob - and the proceeds from sale of their organs - will all go to bolster the licence fee). But they still have their documentaries, the sort of shows other factual broadcasters pretend they're going to make, before wheeling out a load of gimmicky recreations, recaps and silly music. Consider the recent show about Ludwig II of Bavaria; I'm by no means unfamiliar with him, but there was so much here I didn't know. His grand castle Neuschwanstein is the basis for the Disney castle - but I had no idea it was itself a theme park, with modern architecture and engineering hidden behind the scenes, council chambers which were never used - essentially a private playpen. All this was the work of a constitutional monarch conscious modelling his private realm on absolute monarchies - yet at the end they talk to young citizens of Bavaria who acclaim him as too modern for his time. Most broadcasters would be unable to resist a honking noise then, a reminder of the mistake, but BBC4 trusts us to make our own connections.
alexsarll: (Default)
On Friday I was at Nuisance, and Spearmint's 'Sweeping the Nation' was spun before those bloody tables were off the dancefloor, and it made me sad that this hymn to the overlooked was being overlooked once more. But then on Saturday, as I arrived at the too-seldom If You Tolerate Bis, what should be the first song playing as I pay? Damn right. And this time, there was a floor! And dancing! And two songs later was 'You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve'. HELL YES.
Not that I only go to retro indie nights, honest. Two Saturdays earlier I was out in London's Fashionable East London at a self-parodic art opening, briefly elevated by dance-and-light elements which turned a clear plastic shelf (in itself, an Express writer's idea of modern art) into a sort of phantasmal butterfly. Though even this was accompanied by a soundtrack of abrasive noise obviously intended as some form of confrontation, but which I found quite soothing. At one point someone farted and I wondered if this was also part of the artist's multi-sensory assault. And on the intervening weekend I went, briefly, to a cocktail place on Covent Garden. You know when you're in the West End on a weekend, and you see the normal people up from the outer zones for a night on the town, and wonder where they go? This place is one of the answers, and they're welcome to it.
Also: Hillingdon, which I have passed plenty of times on the Oxford Tube. It always looked - by night, anyway - like a strange, shining city of glass and steel had left its outpost in the wilds. Up close...not so much. It is also very noisy, and what appeared to be a zombie pigeon was on the stairs. But the territory between there and Ickenham is lovely, that edge of the suburbs country where you get lots of waste ground, streams, trees, a rope swing or two on which a friend of a friend is always rumoured to have broken something, just because that keeps everyone alert. The sort of place that's fairly hopeless once you become a teenager but, up to about 12, is heaven.
And now I am in Devon, where I spent the morning in a weirdly Mediterranean fishing village, and have just finished chopping wood. Delightful.
alexsarll: (bernard)
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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.
alexsarll: (bernard)
Tom McCarthy's C made the Booker shortlist and had lots of people talking about a rediscovered ambition in the British novel (by which they of course mean literary novel). And yes, OK, it's not about adultery in Muswell Hill, or indeed adultery among the Victorians. It's about sex, drugs, war and the birth of the modern, about secret connections and correspondences, and above all communications. It depicts a dizzying world underlaid by occult traceries. Does that sound familiar? It should, because it is quite blatantly a shorter, less lunatic Gravity's Rainbow. Is that really so impressive? There are some wonderful passages in here, paragraphs about codes, signals - and thus, implicitly, the novel itself - which sparkle with insight and poetry. But which also make me think that McCarthy might be a lot better off as an essayist.

Hallowe'en weekend obviously meant packing in as much spookiness as possible, starting on Wednesday with a trip to the Crypt Gallery on Euston Road. It's a wonderful space, which even saved work I wouldn't have found too interesting in the normal white-walled room, and made good pieces better; my friend's film piece had a caryatid's jug (not like that) outside its alcove door, and the rubbings of the Bank of England seemed like Rosetta stones. There was, however, one piece which in any setting could only have looked like a bell-end.
Friday was perhaps not that spectral; Ale Meat Cider did have on one cider called The Devil's Device, but it was overshadowed (de-shadowed?) by an incredibly cheerful dog called Jasper. Saturday I did my usual and dressed up as Dracula (the Christopher Lee version this year, thanks to Mark Gatiss reminding me of the joy of Hammer) for a trip to the Lexington. And Sunday was centred on the Psychoville special - I liked that they gave everything but the framing story to unreliable narrators, so freeing us from any worry about canonicity or resolving last season's cliffhanger, and leaving them free to concentrate on chilling the blood. Not that any of it could be quite such agonising viewing as Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip last night. So uneventful, yet so very savage.

Solomon Kane is one of the other, less famous creations of Conan author Robert E Howard. He's a Puritan swordsman whose defining characteristic is his determination; he does what needs to be done. Solomon Kane is a film in which James Purefoy supposedly plays him. Except here he's a dithering arse, who having done evil in the past now thinks that only being peaceful - to the point of allowing children to be murdered in front of him - can save his soul. Now, these scenes have a valid point to make about the moral bankruptcy of pacifism, but they're deeply anachronistic for the morality of 1601 in general, nevermind the character of Solomon Kane. But this is not a film much bothered about anachronism or fidelity; we also see the great Puritan taking refuge in a monastery (itself a fairly rare commodity in England in 1601). Purefoy is also affecting what's meant to be a Devon accent but in fact serves only to extinguish his sex appeal, and several times we see pistols (one-shot weapons back then) used to put the wounded out of their misery, rather than saved for emergencies. On top of which, they make the same mistake as the Judge Dredd film; a character who is largely meant to be a force of nature ends up in an all too human plot about his family. It's not wholly worthless - the opening scenes in Africa get the authentically Howard feel in for some carnage both human and demonic - but it's still a massive misfire.
alexsarll: (Default)
The ever-wonderful BBC4 is currently running a series called In Their Own Words, which is essentially footage and tape of authors talking from 1919 to the present day. Some of them are people one can barely conceive of as existing in a recordable era - so we get GK Chesterton (sadly being a bit racist), HG Wells (sadly being a bit of a useful idiot about Russia), and a snippet of Virginia Woolf (paired with the original Alasatian Cousin joke, and this is a programme the young Morrissey would have loved). Admittedly, in many cases people were only filmed past their prime - hence a puffy-faced old Evelyn Waugh eyeing up his interviewer, calling Woolf and Joyce "gibberish" with a hard G, and Christopher Isherwood who may in his youth have been fit to be played by Michael York and Matt Smith, but in later life comes across more like a sketch comedy character. But still, there's Iris Murdoch intense and strangely charming like one of her own characters*, and Anthony Burgess' improbable hair, and I know I've never read it but how come I never realised that The Lord of the Flies is science fiction? The highlight, in spite of stiff competition from Graham Greene refusing to have his face filmed (he's just a smoking hand on a train through the European night - perfectly Greene) is TH White, even if the voiceover does get the number of sequels to The Sword in the Stone wrong. Sat in a sumptuous room in his Channel Island home, White is complaining about how hard up he is after tall his earnings go to the "farewell state". Replies the interviewer - "But you have a swimming pool. And a Temple of Hadrian."

Magicians stars Mitchell & Webb, and is scripted by Bain & Armstrong. As well as some of the rest of the Peep Show cast, it also features half The Thick of It (notably Peter Capaldi as the prestidigitation world's Simon Cowell), Andrea Riseborough, Jessica Stevenson and even Marek Klang getting to do more than be sexually harassed (which is not something one can say for BBC3's new-look Klang Show). And yet, it's really not very good. How do British TV comedy talents so often manage this when they hit the big screen? And, because I increasingly realise there are no two films between which I wouldn't see a connection if I watched them close together, another 2007 film which turns on fake spiritualist activities - There Will Be Blood. As so often with epic American films, it would have been even better if it hadn't been so self-consciously an epic American film - it's trying that little bit too hard to be Citizen Kane or maybe even the mythical director's cut of The Magnificent Ambersons. But, while it could have stood to lose a half hour or so, Daniel Day-Lewis was every bit as good as I'd been given to understand, and I was pleasantly surprised by the happy ending.

An amusingly convoluted tale from the world of Warhol collecting, where the decisions of a shadowy and unaccountable organisation can transform a work's worth overnight from hundreds of thousands to pretty much zero. But since anybody interested in the 'authenticity' of a Warhol work is a moron and/or only in art collecting for the money, their suffering is funny.

*I just finished The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, which reminded me quite how underappreciated she is as a writer of genuine horror - most every book of hers hasone scene which leaves you shuddering for days.
alexsarll: (menswear)
'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 [livejournal.com profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] 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, [livejournal.com profile] xandratheblue took me for veggie fish and chips, a matter on which I must respectfully disagree with both her and [livejournal.com profile] 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.
alexsarll: (Default)
A sign on the main gates announces that Finsbury Park itself will be closing at 5pm by the end of October, with even that shrinking down to 4.30 for the whole of December and the beginning of January. Now, aside from remembering that a couple of years ago it was never closed even in the middle of the night, I'm sure those times are ludicrously and unprecedentedly early, but I suspect that the joggers among you would be better placed to confirm that.

I've been having my old, epic dreams again lately, grand disjointed things that survive the interruptions even when they get crazed or loud enough to wake me. Which means that when they give the impression of continuing from night to night, I can never be quite sure whether they're telling the truth or just building on all those tricks about giving the appearance of a continuity which one picks up consciously and subconsciously from reading a lot of Grant Morrison. Lately there's been a lot of imagery which would suit a Saturday night TV take on Lovecraft - organic matter unfettered by contact with some nameless Unknown, extruding tendrils, faces coming loose - and it may or may not have been linked to the scene which mashed Seizure up with Gormley's Fourth Plinth to give us a slowly filling tank full of copper sulphate solution up there, the last Plinther drowning beatifically in the poison.

Not being an expert like [livejournal.com profile] cappuccino_kid, I've only seen three Joseph Losey films, enough/few enough that having taped The Damned I was surprised to find it a Hammer shocker with a young Oliver Reed in the main supporting role. There's a stilted Englishness I recognise in there, a menace, and a sense of perversion barely suppressed, but at times early in the film the stiltedness would just seem like bad acting if you weren't looking for it, if you didn't see that this came from the same year as his classic, The Servant. Without wanting to spoiler the film (old, but fairly obscure - the spoilering protocols there are always unclear, aren't they?) the Hammer elements seem strangely well-fitted to Losey's England.

Alan Moore is doing the libretto for the next Gorillaz opera.
alexsarll: (bernard)
I thought my policy of always giving a new HBO show a chance might have hit its limits with Hung. Especially since it's on More4 on Thursday nights, at an end of the week already overloaded with Sarah Jane Adventures, Wednesday night's HBO double-bill, Friday's comedy options...but much to my surprise, the first episode at least was excellent. The trailers have been going about it all wrong, emphasising the comedy/prurient angle we've all seen before. Whereas the show itself...in much the same way as The Wire used police and drug gangs as a way to examine the decline of the American city, or Deadwood looked at the birth of the nation by way of a psychopathic publican, Hung examines the squeezing of the middle class through the example of a hard-up history teacher with a really big cock. It's more about the way everything seems to be falling apart, and the sense that our working life is not working out like we were given to expect, than Thomas Jane's endowment.

Wednesday night: [livejournal.com profile] augstone brings [livejournal.com profile] billetdoux along on a mini-US deputation to the Noble, establishing that even if Obama has more sense than to be seen with Gordon Brown, the special relationship is alive and well at the level of indie pubbing. Thursday: a Brontosaurus Chorus show, the first I've seen since [livejournal.com profile] icecoldinalex joined and the first time I've really heard the song for which I spent two days filming - Johnny and I have to resist the urge to re-enact the video on stage. The gig's in a weird little basement venue on Denmark Street called Peter Parker's; there's no Spider-Man iconography that I can see, but the cocktail 'Peter Parker's Cvm Shot' still makes me think 'thwip!'. The support are a noise duo whose name is never announced (my own guess: Sine Cosine Tangent); they're playing in front of a projection of Akira, the subtitles on which provide a perfect excuse to stare at the girl's fairly impressive cleavage. All told, I probably had enough material for a post on Friday, but I had to dash off to catch Seizure (ignore all the pretentious guff in the leaflet, the key details of this art project are that it is very blue and very shiny and quite magical). However, this is probably for the best as it means I can gently draw a veil over the weekend.

I keep hearing good things about the comics of Matt Fraction, so I keep picking them up when the library has them, and I'm still not convinced that he's anything but Warren Ellis's even more try-hard younger brother. All his characters sound the same: "Let's make out and whip up more plans for mass slaughter", cackles the villain. Whereas Iron Man himself gloats "Your tax dollars pay me to beat the Hell out of people like this. (I decline the paycheck, by the way)". Which is identical in tone, and also completely meaningless - he just came up with a line he liked and deployed it even though it required a caveat that then made no sense. The only way I could persevere was by pairing it with the disappointing Micro Men on BBC4, there being a strange congruence of themes. "My biggest nightmare has come true...Iron Man 2.0 is here...and I'm not the one that made it" - the cheap, easy to use and ultimately disposable new technology as plot driver, all made me start identifying Clive Sinclair as a British comedy version of Tony Stark. I don't know what that says about anything but it says more than Fraction's Iron Man.
(Also read something where he at least tried to ditch the tech fetish and the KEWL! - Secret Invasion: Thor. And that was just horribly characterless, in spite of featuring Beta Ray Bill, so maybe the usual mode is the lesser evil for him. The failure of this one was thrown into particular relief by how funny and characterful and cosmic and generally *fun* Secret Invasion: Hercules could make a story starting from a fairly similar premise)

*Although having made derogatory mention of Ellis, it's only fair I acknowledge that the final issue of Planetary was beautiful - the first comic since the end of Captain Britain to leave me both crying and laughing in public. Even if that doesn't explain why it was so ridiculously late. Or why newuniversal is. Or Doktor Sleepless.
alexsarll: (crest)
Every so often, I flick back through my Livejournal to see what I was doing on this day ago. So this weekend, I found that it was a year since I'd last been on a doomed expedition to find anything of artistic worth in the Hayward Gallery, before dawdling along the rest of the South Bank instead. This time, the things which actually gave me the shock to which modern art aspires were a robot wrapped in plastic in the BFI corridor, and seeing the huge doors on the side of the Turbine Hall open for the first time - though we did get some laughs from Joan Miro's muff obsession.
It's also a year since I saw the Indelicates launch the album of 2008, American Demo. And now they're back with some new stuff mixed in to the set - 'The Recession Song' has already been doing the rounds, ditto Simon's 'David Koresh Superstar' side-project (but what a perfect source for a song to spice up the Easter set). But the new song proper, 'Savages'...oh, it's lovely. More 'New Art For The People' or '...if Jeff Buckely had Lived' than 'We Hate The Kids', more beauty than bile (but with plenty of bitterness still because this is, after all, an Indelicates song).
Their Cargo show on Tuesday is a Club Attitude event, intended to encourage disabled people to attend gigs. Whether incapacity benefits would cover Cargo drinks prices is another question, but the photographer whizzing around in a pimped wheelchair is pretty swish, and the sign language guy...I'm used to sign language guys being expressionless berks in red sweaters who obscure a quarter of the screen when I'm trying to watch a late-night film, and who just make me think 'What's wrong with subtitles?' This man feels like part of the band from the start, getting into it, really conveying the spirit of the music as well as the words. He is an artist. Plus, he looks like Ming the Merciless crossed with [livejournal.com profile] moleintheground, so watching him sign "but for the come in your hair" was always going to be classic.
No signer on Saturday, but there is Mr Solo, in a more conventional gig format than I usually see him, and as such, with an audience who seemed less appreciative. I think they must have been the peons there en masse for the other band, whose name happily escapes me.

Between my own sluggish attempts at getting up after the Bank Holiday excesses, and the dearth of Uxbridge trains, it was apparent to me yesterday that I was going to be late enough for the Tubewalk that I couldn't in all conscience ask everyone to wait for me - I decided instead to trust to synchronicity, and set off on my own walk in the rough direction of Rayner's Lane. Which didn't bring me to the expeditionary force, but did find me a wonderful little streamside park, and a house so tumbledown and overgrown that rather than thinking 'slatterns' it makes you think 'Sleeping Beauty in Pinner', and a very confused mouse lost on a main road.

Dear Gordon - I know you're a bit busy at the moment on account of your aides being a shower of arses who can't even run a smear campaign without tripping over themselves, but you should still be aware that there is, by definition, no such thing as a 'compulsory volunteer'. Such work is not 'voluntary', it is simply 'unpaid'. And mandatory unpaid work is called 'slavery'.
(ETA: This article has been tidied up since it was first posted, and now uses 'voluntary' considerably less than it did. But it still uses it, so the point still stands)
Another great move by the party of labour there - getting back to the old socialist roots with work camps, while simultaneously depressing the job market by providing a free alternative!
Though arguably the whole issue is academic, given it hinges on Brown winning the next election.

Margaret Drabble, in a piece about coping with depression, wisely recommends walking. But more interestingly, she also mentions "I've met only one writer who frankly admits that if it hadn't been for the drink, he'd have committed suicide long ago. Nobody would publish his book on alcohol as life-saver, because everyone is keen to toe the safer party line that it's really a depressant." I'd like to read that book, if anyone fancies running the neo-Puritan blockade. Bet it would have been all over the place if Wee Charlie Kennedy were PM.
alexsarll: (Default)
Am finally getting in the festive spirit, I think - I'll put the decorations up in a minute and then this evening it's Soul Mole. But in the meantime, think of this as Newsnight Review only with better comics coverage, or The Culture Show if that weren't just a sad comment on how far Lauren Laverne has fallen:

I must have visited the British Museum after dark before, but if so I've forgotten how much that suits it - with some galleries closed, no school parties and that sense of being hunkered in, you feel much closer to the past. Which leaves some areas almost too much - the Egyptian room in particular. Dropped in last night with an eye to catching the 'Statuephilia' works (and please, can whoever called it that be the subject of the next of the current series of press witch-hunts?), although the only one of which I was specifically aware was Marc Quinn's solid gold Kate Moss. Which, for the biggest gold statue made since the days of the Pharoahs, of an iconically beautiful woman in a more-than-suggestive position, is curiously inert. The Gormley angel on the way in is, well, the Angel of the North but smaller, so cheers for that, and Ron Mueck's giant head is a nice special effect misrepresented as art. I've not heard of Noble & Webster before, but their rather ghoulish piece is worth a look - and I won't say more than that because I think the surprise of the gradual recognition is a big part of its effect (skip the brochure description until after, if you go). The real stand-out, though, is the Damien Hirst. He's in my favourite room, which helps, and he's worked with it, almost snuck his gaudy skulls in to those bookcases which line that Enlightment room like it's the ultimate gentleman's study, which in a sense it is. For all the media fuss around him, Hirst does impress me in a way few of his generation manage - because for all that I couldn't tell you what the best of his work makes me feel, for all that I doubt he could either, it makes me feel something, something vertiginous and important. And that's what art is for, and why he'll be remembered and his work treasured after the hype and his peers are consigned to the art history books and back rooms.

Even if you didn't know about the lead times, it would be obvious that the conclusion of Marvel's Secret Invasion was plotted some time before the result of the US election. Spoilers, obviously - well, unless you read Thunderbolts )

Apparitions gets more splendidly mental by the week - even knowing that last night's episode would feature demonically-possessed foetuses at an abortion clinic didn't prepare me for the magnificence of spoiler ) And next week - Father Jacob has a gun! Fvck knows why.
Switched over for Star Stories (which still hasn't recaptured the charm of the first series) just in time to catch the end of a documentary about Health & Safety officers, and find myself in an awkward position. The show ended with the most stereotypical H&S bore you could imagine - think Steve Coogan's "in 1983, no one died" character, minus the verve and spontaneity - talking about how it was absurd to say Health & Safety culture had gone too far when people still had accidents; as far as he was concerned, and he said this explicitly, Britain would not be safe enough until there were no accidents. Now, this guy is at best horribly misguided, and clearly in need of a nailgun enema, right? But, he was upset to read a newspaper column in which he was being savaged by Richard Littlejohn. Health & Safety bore. Littlejohn. How do we resolve this so that they both lose?
Then, having abandoned Star Stories, instead watched The Devil's Whore, which really seemed to pick up this episode, possibly because we've got to the bit where it becomes clear that Oliver Cromwell was not in fact a hero of democracy but a hypocrite, an oathbreaker and a racist war criminal.

I love the Dexy's brass joy and heartfelt yelps of the Rumble Strips, and 'Back to Black' is one of my favourite Amy Winehouse songs, but the former covering the latter? Bit of a car crash, TBH.
alexsarll: (bernard)
Oh dear. Came home from the park to change my jacket and brush my teeth prior to Poptimism, sat on the edge of my bed to empty out my pockets - and instantly fell asleep, in the process knocking over all manner of stuff. Whether we blame that on the jumbo bottle of pink plonk I had at the picnic, or how hard it was sleeping in last week's heat, that one has to go in the file marked FAIL.
On the plus side, after waking up at 1am and deciding against going down for the last half hour, I did manage to get back to sleep until, well, now. Which should mean I'm pretty well caught up.

Has anybody been to the orientalism exhibition at the Tate? I'm in two minds about going; I love the reproductions I've seen of some of the pictures, but factor in both the hideous lighting that place has at present (which I may have mentioned once or twice before), and my unease with the likely ideological framework*, as well as my general tendency to find single-theme or -artist exhibitions a little prone to diminishing returns...

For Salman Rushdie to demand the censorship of a book - defamatory or not, it just looks bad, doesn't it?

Hypothetical terror plot, inspired by the summer attire of Britain's less salubrious subjects, which I think is just outside the realms of possibility and too silly to use in a thriller, and so offer for consideration here: could someone disguise sufficient explosives as the crud under their toenails to do any damage? Possibly concealing the detonator separately in the guise of bellybutton fluff.

*"Orientalism is more than just a bad book. It is a bad book that legitimates bad politics. It is a great wedge of dishonesty that has begat a great mountain of ignorance. It is a treason of the clerks, an intellectual fraud that justifies bigotry and hatred."
alexsarll: (Default)
I'd heard that Boston Legal was very funny, and it is. But nobody told me how sad it was too. James Spader's brilliant, but he's well withink his comfort zone of retilian charm. Shatner, on the other hand...based on the first two episodes, this seems to be the closest he'll get to playing Lear.

Been a while since I talked about any films on here, hasn't it? But then it's been a while since I saw any, what with all the TV series and Curse Of Comedy one-offs and books and even a little socialising. Until yesterday, the last one I did see was Clerks II, of which there's little to be said beyond "If you like Kevin Smith films, you'll like this, though probably not quite as much". And while I've finally seen Snakes on a Plane, talking about that online became passe as soon as it was released, didn't it? Though the resemblance of the FBI agent on the ground to Barack Obama was probably not registered sufficiently at the time. I can say something useful about The Dark Is Rising, though: DO NOT WATCH IT. Don't watch it 'cos you liked the books; it's a travesty. Don't watch it for Christopher Eccleston or Ian McShane; they are visibly thinking "I quit Who for *this*?" and "I can't believe Deadwood stopped so David Milch could make a show about surf Jesus." Don't even watch it for sh1ts and giggles; it's too dreary and cheap and lazy even to muster those. Althought it has left me with a renewed determination to reread the books.

"The display of works of art, for example, is to be fussy about what colour pictures are hung on - at what height they're hung. That sounds like a really elitist preoccupation to many people, but it's absolutely not. If pictures are overlit or underlit, or if they're at the wrong height, they're put at a slight dis-advantage. The connoisseur-director who is forever fussing about the fabric to me is engaging in what is a crucial popular activity." After seeing how badly John Martin's masterpieces were being served by height and light last time I was in the Tate, it's great to know that the National Gallery's new director is a "fighting high brow".

Department of Conspiracy: you may have heard about New York governor Eliot Spitzer's resignation after he was caught consorting with prostitutes. Which rather handily overshadowed this article he wrote for the Washington Post. An article in which he notes that the federal government had used some rather obscure powers to over-ride state consumer protection legislation which might have stopped the sub-prime mortgage debacle getting quite so horribly out of hand.
alexsarll: (crest)
Just returned from the Bankside 12th Night celebrations - unfortunate that the thing which best gets me in the relevant festive mood is the one marking season's end. It's vastly more popular than last time I went (I think I missed last year), but I still managed half-decent views of the Green Man's arrival and the wassailing, and was in a pretty good position for the mummers' play. There's a nagging sense in my mind of a half-formed connection between this and Popular last night - the Number One single as a British folk tradition, perhaps? - but I don't want to force it. Suffice to say, both were great fun. Highlight of Popular: 'Welcome To The Black Parade' into 'Boom! Shake The Room' (it may have a 100% strict concept, 'God Save The Queen' controversy aside, but how many nights can honestly equal that variety?). Highlight of 12th Night: the blithering arses next to me as the Green Man sails in justify their yapping by noting what I would otherwise have missed - there's a fragment of rainbow in the sky above us, and it's on a curved cloud. In other words - the sky smiled.
Post-mumming, took a look at the Tate's crack. I've seen better. Still, rather that than Catherine Tate's crack.

Don't know why I never got round to seeing Die Hard With A Vengeance sooner, given I love the first two, but the delay has made parts of it queasily prescient. Shots of the twin towers looming as New York is attacked I could have expected, but the real shocker...you know the plan Jeremy Irons and his accents are supposed to be undertaking, to beggar the USA? Dubya's pretty much managed that, hasn't he? And done it all while speaking in almost as silly a voice. Still, with Barack Obama's campaign regaining momentum, for now there's still hope. And in the Andes, two of the USA's hyper-rich are helping to fund an eye on the sky which will not only increase the sum (and accessibility) of human knowledge, but could well save us all from apocalyptic meteor impact. Isn't it odd how the merely super-rich seem content with vulgarity like diamond-studded mobiles and £35,000 cocktails, but the hyper-rich seem to rediscover altruism and vision? See also Warren Buffett.

A pretty quiet week for comics, but there were excellent new issues of Buffy (the first slow, character-centred episode of Whedon's Season Eight, but worth the wait) and Moon Knight. I still don't know what part of writing Entourage has equipped Mark Benson with a knack for brutal vigilante thrillers, but between his Punisher annual and this, I'm impressed. Just a shame about the art. Otherwise, it's Warren Ellis' week; Ultimate Human may not be the obvious title for a series marketing would probably rather have had as Ultimate Hulk Vs Iron Man, but fits the story Ellis has started telling, one of the happier vehicles for his recurrent fascination with the nature of posthumanity. Thunderbolts, on the other hand, is leaving the smart politics aside for the moment and concentrating on insanity, treachery and Venom eating people. Which also works.
alexsarll: (manny)
Now, of all the monsters I wasn't expecting to see brought back...
I think I liked 'Gridlock', though it wasn't at all what I was expecting; it felt like a 2000AD story given a happy ending (of sorts) by the Doctor's intervention. Possibly one of RTD's best stories? Also: sob.

It's not easy on the nerves DJing at someone else's, successful-with-the-general-public night; far more pressure than at one's own doomed follies. Still, I was on early, for the slow between band sets, so I think it went OK if only because I would have really had to make a hash of things for it to register.
You follow me in or you don't; either way it's alright )
And then Luxembourg, roaring into their new incarnation to general public acclaim. It's great to have them back.

Have been doing a lot of London wandering these past couple of days, thinking. Mostly warm and hapy thoughts inspired by the city - but the good thoughts all seem to be as vast and resistant to order as London herself. It's only the bad ones that coalesce into coherence. Like - the new Brunswick is a soul-less pseudo-metropolitan horror if ever I saw one. Like - those slides at the Tate really didn't use the space as well as they might (though the exclusive Long Blondes track upstairs is pretty good).

*I was actually trying to play Leonard Cohen, and didn't notice one of the tracks had been crossed out.

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