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

A few weeks back, Livejournal stirred into something approaching life, and in the manner of the old days there was A Meme. About what people were up to a year ago, five years, ten. And the nostalgia of it all...well, people sometimes forget that the '-algia' in there is pain. That was an apt precursor to The World's End. Shaun of the Dead was already a film about the pain of growing up, so stack the best part of another decade on top of that, then go see it with some approximation of the old gang, and even a film assembling this much comic talent (and there are plenty of laughs) is going to feel like a twisted knife in places. I can't recall such a bittersweet comedy which is still so successful qua comedy since Withnail. Part of the power is in the way it dodges polemic: yes, refusing to grow up is seen as a sad and sorry way to live, but so is growing up. In so far as there's any kind of answer, it's the knowingly grand and ridiculous grab for another, impossible option which reminds me of the Indelicates' 'Dovahkiin'. It's not just a self-regarding elegy, mind - it also has lots to say about how the new cinema ideal of bromance is no more realistic or healthy than the Hollywood take on romance. Which is obviously no less saddening. I'm going to miss the Cornetto Trilogy, not mollified by their being in part films about missing the films you grew up on.
Also seen at the cinema (on the same day, which I don't believe I've ever done before - it does the trailers no favours): Pacific Rim, in which Guillermo del Toro has giant robots punch monsters, and vice versa, in a delightfully solid way which always feels like a Guillermo del Toro film, until the humans start interacting with each other when his normal sureness of touch deserts him, and even normally dependable actors fall oddly flat (one excellent and un-publicised cameo aside). And not at the cinema, but on the same day as its cinematic release, A Field in England. Which I applaud, even while thinking that a little more forethought about the casting might have made it more instantly convincing as the psychedelic horror it wants to be, rather than the oddball comedy as which it inadvertently opens.

More nostalgia: the Buffy-themed bash at the GNRT. Even more so, back to the Woodbine for the first time in a while, and the last time was itself the first time in a while too. As if to emphasise how long it is since that was a regular haunt, there's foliage growing into the Gents' and a wine called Tempus. Subtle symbolism there, Life. Still, there have been times of living too. Celebrating the Solstice atop Primrose Hill, and walking back from Mr B and the Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra along the dusky Parkland Walk, eternal moments when the level of drunk and the setting are exactly as they should be and one feels no longer apart from the world but in contact with the infinite and suffused with joy and peace. Took xandratheblue to Devon and, in the five years or so my parents have been there, this was the first time I swam in the sea, as against paddling, because for once I'd timed it right weatherwise. And we found a dragon skull on the beach. Then to lovely little Sherborne, and up Dancing Hill, which is in fact rather steep for dancing but I guess satyrs are nimble. Back in London, we were greeted by St Paul's and it's blue trees as a reminder that, lovely as holidays can be, this is the place to be. Though we did then go see Eddie Argos in an Edinburgh show about holidays, which might have made more sense before rather than after our own. Still lovely, mind.
(Other Edinburgh previews seen: Henry Paker, being powerfully bald, and Jeff Goldblum and his prawn (aka Ben Partridge). Not seen near so many this year as the last couple)

Wrapping up, since who knows when I'll get round to posting again: having chance to dance to Pink for the first time since Don't Stop Moving stopped moving, and 'Elephant Elephant' for the first time full stop, was a delight; I like the view from Telegraph Hill, though not the walk there in the sun (and it should have kept the old name, Plowed Garlic Hill); and I love how in a European city the Holy Thorn Reliquary would be in the cathedral, what with having part of Jesus' crown of thorns inside, but in London we just stick it in a back room of the museum, because we basically have the warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark but let tourists wander around it 'cos we're cool like that.

*I've seen the Indelicates and Keith Totp (&c) twice since I last posted, and the Indelicates don't even play London that often anymore. Even seen the very seldom-sighted Quimper, who are coming into their own with the new live set-up, all disturbing projections and shadowed lurking. Also Desperate Journalist, who already had a good soundscape going, but are a lot more compelling now exliontamer has started really going for it on stage. And Mikey Georgeson aka Vessel aka Mr Solo, formerly a frequent fixture (and I think probably still the performer I've seen live the most times) for the first time in a year or so. He was, of course, excellent - the new tracks as good as ever, in particular 'I See What You Did There' and the waltz which sounds like imperial phase Bowie working with Tom Waits.

"You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see there will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone 'Give me the gun', etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone's asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they don't mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg - that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of 'life'.Now, with eery day that passes, another door seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN, or FIGHT EVIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors - GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE - keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even ones that didn't necessarily need to be closed..."
An early passage which goes some way to summing up the sprawling, glorious boarding school tragicomedy of (extended) adolescence that is Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. Set in a boarding school, the perspective shifts between a young teacher, wondering if he's supposed to have grown up yet, and the boys - Skippy among them - at the other end of the same inconclusive journey. Even if it were a lot less ambitious than it is, the sheer verve with which Murray catches the dynamics of schoolboy interaction would make this worth reading; I was especially taken with alleged lothario Mario, and his friends' gradual realisation that you should never take advice on girls from anyone who has a lucky condom. But Murray is going for something much bigger than that; I would say that his critique of the modern managerial approach to schools, embodied in acting head 'the Automator', is heavy-handed, except that I recently heard about my old school's new motto 'Together Everyone Achieves More (TEAM)'. And it takes a while for the M-theory subplot to make clear what it's doing in the book except providing a hobby for Skippy's room-mate, the rotund genius/bullsh1tter Ruprecht. There is, as well, a little too much event, and not quite the same charm, in the book's final third, once the eponymous event has come to pass. Still, it was a Booker longlist entry which looks a lot better than most of the shortlist* and, given this was only his second novel, I will take great interest in Murray's further work. So much quotable stuff in there, but I shall restrain myself to one more:
"Violence solves everything, you idiot, look at the history of the world. Any situation they have, they dick around with it for a while, then they bring in violence. That's the whole reason they have scientists, to make violence more violent."

Beyond that, plenty of pubbing this weekend and one rather splendid gig at which, for the first time, I saw the Video Club and the Art Goblins, two noughties indie outfits I feared I had missed forever. And what outfits - the Video Club resplendent in Regency frills and a flashing green line protruding from the keyboardist's fly, Art Goblins in matching jackets like a fifties US street gang. Plus Small Crew, Dream Themes and Mr Solo, and possibly too much of the Buffalo Bar's house white. Happy times.

Trinny & Susannah: From Boom to Bust is a lot better than a spoof documentary about makeover presenters has any right to be. The chap who played Nathan Barley is especially brilliant/odious as their faithless agent.

*I do also have Tom McCarthy's C out of the library - and while I've yet to start it, it's pretty unprecedented that I would even attempt two books from a modern Booker longlist, so they're doing something at least that right.

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.

A moment of unexpected beauty: walking to the dole office, hardly the highlight of my week, I find myself striding through a rain of blossom just as, on my earphones, the Indelicates' 'Unity Mitford' peaks. I've just found a lovely map of fairy places, but can't help but feel it has slightly missed the point when enchantment lurks around every corner if you get the moment right. And so often this week, the moment has been right - spring just starting to feel confident that it's here to stay, the grass going mad to get as close to the sun as quickly as possible, everything alive. Everything possible.

Gigging galore over the past week; last night was the first full Soft Close-Ups show, in the Vibe Bar. Does Brick Lane have more curry houses or complete tossers? It's a close-run thing. The Vibe Bar seems to acquire new rooms every time I visit, and now has an atrium, a giant eagle, a postbox and what looks like a hotel. The set was hampered by the poor sound quality one comes to expect at multimedia art happening experiences, but otherwise wonderful, and I'm not just saying that because augstone took my advice after the last show about resurrecting the axe god moves, pedals and feather boa. Or feather boar, as I just typed.
On Tuesday at the less up-own-jacksie Lexington, Jonny Cola & the A-Grades and Glam Chops, both as stylish and pop as ever, the latter with a new jumpsuit for Eddie, whose new Art Brut album came out the day before but who was still here playing small shows with two of his side-projects. The other being Keith Top Of The Pops And His Minor UK Indie Celebrity All-Star Backing Band, a poorly-recorded version of whose excellent show you can see here. I can't decide whether the highlight was 'I Hate Your Band', with thedavidx and James Rocks playing each other's guitars while Keith sings "you could swap members, you could swap songs", or Fvck The MSP, with its rousing final chant of "Nicky Wire can suck my cock", something I hesitate to mention on the internet lest someone write the slash fic where Nicky Wire does exactly that to all 16 members of the band, including the girls.

Listening to the new Decemberists album, I wonder, as I did with the last two, why the same band who can sound so genuinely...unearthly is the wrong word, because I think of our Earth's past, or at least our Earth's past as it should have been, so say 'out of time'...on most of the songs, manage to sound so like a pedestrian indie outfit on the rest. The one which appears to have escaped from a poor PJ Harvey album in particular. Still, all considerably better than the new Bat For Lashes, which I don't even know why I bothered stealing - it doesn't even have one delightfully eerie single like the first album, it's just boil-in-the-bag kookiness for dull people.

I still don't know quite what to say after the H Bird show. Obviously I knew it was going to be a night of top pop entertainment, and as bittersweet as a farewell show's always going to be, but I honestly wasn't expecting to get a song dedicated to me just for hectoring them all into playing a gig, much less a cover of my favourite Lifestyle song. Thank you, H Bird. You will be missed.
(There's always the possibility of a reunion show, of course. This was one, in a sense, but it felt like more of one; watching them on stage, they no longer seemed quite so in-the-same-band as they used to, and suddenly I had fully formed in my head the pop star biographies of what they've been up to in the meantime, biographies which were blithely heedless of my knowing mere facts to the contrary. augstone has seen a million faces and rocked them all, possibly in a stadium version of Rock Stone; ksta's soundtrack work led to her marrying a big Hollywood mogul type, I think a director; and hospitalsoup became a sort of Laurie Anderson experimental music figure)
Also a surprise: Mr Solo's support slot was not in fact solo, he performed as a double act with Eddie Argos! Which meant mixing a bit of Glam Chops material in there too, plus Art Brut's 'Moving to LA' for ksta. This made me very glad; since they cancelled their cancellation for tomorrow's SB, I was upset to be missing them on account of White Mischief (which reminds me - who else is going?). On top of which we got a Bowie/Ronson moment with a pink toy guitar, and a further guest on drums - John Moore (whose Bo Diddley tribute, incidentally, is the best one I've seen). Which I guess made them Glam Chops Recorder.

What else have I been up to lately? A pub quiz, with mixed results, after which I accidentally intimidated a hoodie. At Clockwork I was impressed by one comedian's Seal of Rassilon tattoo* and another's Harold Shipman impression. On the screen, I was unimpressed by the original Deneuve Belle de Jour and vampire superhero sequel Blade: Trinity. Which may seem like very different films, but have strangely similar flaws - a lead who's restrained to the point of near absence, and hideous editing. It could also be noted that I liked both of the Daywalker's previous films; similarly, I liked the writing of Belle's namesake.

After a promising start, Marvel's Secret Invasion seems to be getting very bogged down; this week's issue had one lovely scene on the helicarrier, but was otherwise far too obvious for an event which initially seemed to be all about cutting the ground from under our feet. Ultimate Origins, on the other hand...it's clearly the original creators of the Ultimate U showing all the clever stuff they had hidden before Jeph Loeb comes in and craps all over the place with Ultimatum, but none the worse for that. A little too decompressed, perhaps, but that was the fashion at the time. Covering surprisingly similar ground, the new issue of Garth Ennis' The Boys is one of the strongest since the DC issues; he seems to have got the pee po belly bum drawers bit out of his system and got back to the really nasty stuff: business.
Single best comic of the week, though: the final part of Drew Goddard's Buffy story. Just like the best episodes of the TV show, there's not a page allowed past without doing something either hilarious, awesome or heartbreaking. Sometimes more than one of the above.

Anyone else been getting Scientologist spam lately? Way to win people over, cretins.

*The one tat there was ever any remote chance of me getting; having been beaten to it reduces the chance from slim to none.

The smoking ban. Catherine Tate as the Doctor's companion next season. The death of Fopp. The weather. And just because that's not enough bad news to be getting on with, the Chavez/Ahmadinejad supervillain team-up rolls on. "Today Hugo Chavez is the most talkative, launching a tirade against the "barbarians" he says have invaded Iraq, and comparing them with the barbarians he says destroyed the ancient civilisations of Latin America." Now, by now I would hope anyone reading this journal appreciates that I am not naturally on the side of aggressive Catholic imperialism, but he is talking about civilisations which practised mass human sacrifice. Civilisations whose own subjectt states allied with the invaders because anything had to be better than being a source of blood and beating hearts for the Aztec death gods - and who, in spite of the ensuing conquistador atrocities, were probably right. But no, as far as the Secret Society of Supervillains, sorry, 'Axis of Unity', is concerned, because those death cults were enemies of the West, they must have been the good guys. Next week: because the Jews opposed the sacrifice of children to Moloch, Ahmadinejad decides that even if it does oppose every tenet of islam, reinstituting the worship of Moloch can't be all bad.

Looking for some small candle to hold against this darkness, I find only unconfirmed possibilities; Boris Johnson is apparently 'not ruling out' standing for Mayor of London against the loathsome liche-lord who, in life, was known as Ken Livingstone. And in the new NME Eddie Argos mentions the formation of The English Travelling Wilburys - a supergroup featuring himself, Luke Haines, David Devant (presumably he means the Vessel)...and Frank Sidebottom. One fears these might both be back-of-beermat plans, destined to leave no more trace than the morning fog - but right now they would appear to be the closest things we've got to hope. Hell, even The Thick Of It seems to have lost its pinpoint accuracy; this week's special may still have had some good swearing, but in its failure to anticipate anything like the shape of the Labour leadership handover, it no longer felt like a smuggled report of the truth behind the scenes, and that was always at least as much of a factor in its appeal.

edit: Reading back through the friendslist, Stockholm Syndrome seems to be breeding excuses for the abomination Tate. As a public service, I offer a reminder of potential companions less inevitably dreadful than a reprise of Donna from The Worst Who Episode Ever:
Dalek Sec (having swapped his smart suit for a hoodie, better to appeal to Ver Kidz)
Russell T Davies' sphincter, expelling its contents onto the camera lens every five minutes
Adric
A Slitheen in a fez