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)
Just when the prequel webisodes and the first half of the series opener had me worried that the new series of Primeval was a bit straightforward compared to the inspired lunacy of last series, that skating so close to cancellation had them scared - they had the character played by Hannah from S Club distract a totally enormous and temporarily non-extinct dinosaur by playing 'Don't Stop Moving' really loudly at it. Excellent. But it still feels very odd that the only exciting original programming on TV all week is two hours on ITV1.

So, New Year's Eve. I've not been to anything but a house party since the Islington Bar glory days of Stay Beautiful, or to anything which required public transport for nearly as long, and I think maybe I had the right idea. I like Bevan 17, I like the No Fiction resident DJs, I even liked the odd singer-songwriter/accordionist/beatboxer opening act who seemed even more out of place than I was as they did a surprisingly good cover of 'So Long, Marianne'. But the crappy 8 bit duo in between who spent 15 minutes fiddling about as though it was going to make them sound any less piss-poor, and the Whip's DJ set of headache electro, and the boozed-up populace of Kilburn who just wanted somewhere to get lairy, and the hordes of mad-eyed partyers on the Tube of whom half seem only to go out on this one night...no thanks. I'm still not sure if I was actually ill or just in some form of existential shock, but having only had two pints while out, by 2am I was in bed, and on New Year's Day I felt considerably worse than if I'd been overdoing it round a friend's house the night before as per usual. But I do like the way the unusual shape of the weeks this time round has stretched out the holiday season - it has less of a direct effect on me than on a lot of people, but the sense of a proper extended break, almost of carnival, is contagious.

Mark Gatiss' history of horror reminded me that years back, m'learned colleague [livejournal.com profile] dr_shatterhand had recommended I watch seventies Brit horror The Blood on Satan's Claw. Gatiss brackets it alongside Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man as 'folk horror', and I'd agree with the first half of that; as far as I'm concerned The Wicker Man isn't horror at all, but an Ealing comedy by another name. This, though...this is definitely horror. Sometime in the early 18th century*, somewhere in the English countryside, a demonic relic is unearthed and the village children's games turn sinister. Very gradually, at first, yet it's still terribly sinister, and I love that - it reminds me of Arthur Machen's 'The White People', or the final Quatermass, or Robert Holdstock's Lavondyss from before his Mythago books got dull, when they still captured all the strangeness and terror of myth. What could have been a Merrie Englande fiasco is instead just grotty enough and grey enough to feel like the real countryside on its off days, as the diabolic forces bubble up from beneath.
(Added points of interest for Doctor Who fans: sh1t eighties Master Anthony Ainley plays the vicar, and sixties companion Zoe aka Wendy Padbury is the centrepiece of a ritual gang rape scene which, alarmingly, was apparently pretty much improvised on the spot)

*The blurb says the 17th, but a Jacobite character toasts James III, so no.

Snapshot

Jul. 12th, 2010 09:52 am
alexsarll: (magnus)
"Tonight, he thought, even if we fail with this first, we'll send a second and a third ship and move on out to all the planets and, later, all the stars. We'll just keeping going until the big words like immortal and for ever take on meaning. Big words, yes, that's what we want. Continuity. Since our tongues first moved in our mouths, we've asked, What does it all mean? No other question made sense, with death breathing down our necks. But just let us settle in on ten thousand worlds spinning around ten thousand alien suns and the question will fade away. Man will be endless and infinite, even as space is endless and infinite. Man will go on, as space goes on, for ever. Individuals will die, as always, but our history will reach as far as we'll ever need to see into the future, and with the knowledge of our survival for all time to come, we'll know security and thus the answer we've always searched for."
Sunday afternoon, and I'm sat in the John Snow. I'd been at a birthday which was perfectly pleasant until the pub staff literally started pulling the stools from under people because it was apparently going to be standing room only for the Eighty Years War retread of an accursed footballist finale. Later, I'm going to hang out with Bevan 17 in the studio as they answer the question, what if, when John Cooper Clarke was living with Nico, they'd made a record together? But for now I'm sat watching the dust sparkle in the sun in a pub which still feels like pubs should feel on a Sunday afternoon, where etiquette has not been upended and nobody looks like they're in a Tango ad, and I'm reading Ray Bradbury. And just before I reach that passage above in 'The End of the Beginning', I am gripped by terror as I apprehend something monstrous: we're all on Earth. Well, yes there are a handful of people in near orbit, which amounts to the same thing, but all our eggs are in one basket. We are the last. As should be abundantly clear by now, I love London, and I think Arthur Machen was right when he described it as an emblem for infinity. But imagine knowing that beyond the last of London's lights, there was no one. That's where we've let ourselves end up. My copy of The Day it Rained Forever was printed in 1963. That story sat on this paper on a shelf somewhere as man fulfilled its promise and went to the Moon...and then sat there still as we turned our backs on the moon, mothballed even the poxy Shuttle, decided to stick to Earth after all. It's not a good feeling, being ashamed that your species has betrayed a yellowing paperback.
alexsarll: (Default)
Here's a bit of a join-the-dots: sadly I can't make it myself, but on Saturday, Stewart Lee is reading from one of the founding texts of psychogeography, Arthur Machen's 'N'. Which is also a very good horror story. The story is about Stoke Newington, and so it's an appropriate part of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival, which also has an appearance by China Mieville. China Mieville was apparently meant to be reviving Swamp Thing, and work on the comic was well advanced, but has now been binned - because rather than a Mature Readers series, DC want Swamp Thing back in their main superhero universe. Even though most of that universe has lately been telling 'mature' stories anyway, in the sense meaning 'immature', all blood and guts and angst. Even though Swamp Thing going Mature Readers was where America discovered Alan Moore, where the groundwork was laid for Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison going over there, where - to simplify ever so slightly - American comics became worth reading. And they're backing away from the chance to do that again (edit: here's more on what we've lost). Which makes me worry that DC is still on the wrong lines. Which is particularly unfortunate given Paul Cornell (a name Doctor Who fans should know) is apparently about to sign an exclusive with them. I already felt some trepidation - his best comics work all having been at Marvel, most notably the cancelled, glorious Captain Britain & MI:13 - but looked forward to what he was going to do with Lex Luthor in Action Comics. Still, I don't want him trapped in a company which makes such reliably bad editorial decisions lately. On the other hand, his most recent output elsewhere was BBC medical horror pilot Pulse, and that wasn't very good. As a massive hypochondriac, I expected it to make difficult viewing - but because I would be getting freaked out, not because I was so bored by the parade of cliches, played mainly by actors you recall being quite good in something a few years back but not having seen much of lately. I don't know, maybe people who like medical drama - and I know there are plenty - will enjoy it more. I did notice that contrary to advance hype, while Cornell scripted, it was based on an idea by someone else. That may explain it.

Wednesday was always going to be interesting; Dickon's new event, Against Nature, at Proud, with The Vichy Government and the Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra on the same bill. Proud's South Gallery turns out to be significantly less vile than the other bit; it could still have done without the staff pointedly rearranging the furniture while Dickon and [livejournal.com profile] retro_geek were trying to keep people dancing after the acts, but those who did stay were treated to the unexpected ballroom dance skills of [livejournal.com profile] keith_totp. Vichy were distorted to fvck - which is how I like them best - and MFMO were deeply numerous, appropriate given they had two new songs about fleas. Plus, improvisational tales of Empire and derring-do from Jingo & Butterfield, who apparently caused one walk-out, clearly from humourless nitwits. All in all, a good night, which is not something I ever thought I would say about Proud.

A venue I used to love was the Garage, which finally reopened about a year back now, but to which I'd not been until a surprise trip last night. It's disconcertingly clean and shiny now, and has a higher ceiling, but that's probably for the best because it was always a bit of a sweatbox so yesterday could otherwise have been Hellish. I was there to see the Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, always a band where I've quite liked what I heard but failed to investigate further. And after last night, I possibly understand them even less - which is not a bad thing. I had them down as, more or less, the slightly less daft Horrors - but at its finest moments, the gig could almost have passed for the Sisters. The singer reminds me of that kid everyone vaguely knew who wanted to be Dave Wyndorf, and almost made it work. The crowd were a real mix - punks, psychobillies, retro chic kids, and one man who looked like Mugatu from Zoolander modelling his new 'scary clown' look. Also, much more mixed-race than rock crowds tend to be. I enjoyed it, but I still didn't entirely feel it, if that makes sense. The best explanation I can manage is that they sound quite Earthbound, something I've only experienced once before, when seeing of all people Eric Clapton (don't ask). I think all the bands who really sing to me are trying to escape the sublunary sphere - whether through traditional transcendence, the reflection in a nightbus window or just via someone else's pants. And here I don't hear that.
alexsarll: (Default)
Spent Thursday evening sat in friends' garden until gone 10 and a fair amount of Friday reading in the park, then yesterday there again for a pleasingly languid picnic interrupted by one attempt at skipping, which I'm sure didn't used to feel so terrifying, but then that was about 20 years ago when my legs weren't so long and easily caught. Also my first ice cream of the year, except it turns out there age hasn't changed so much, and I still get the sauce down my front. Other weekend activities: Nuisance, which in amongst the beloved and the half-forgotten and the not-really-Britpop-but-it's-ace-so-who's-counting*, once again managed to redefine 'going too far' with an airing for Kula Shaker's 'Mystical Machine Gun'. Just as the Beatles' 'All You Need Is Love' is justified by its use in the final episode of The Prisoner without in any way being redeemed, so with 'Mystical Machine Gun' and Phonogram. Not that even 'Mystical Machine Gun' is as bad as 'All You Need Is Love', obviously. Nothing is.
Still, good night otherwise. Also, one of the Monarch's bouncers talks like a Mexican Darth Vader. Brilliant.
Then on Saturday, one of my occasional forays into DJing, this time at a masked ball. Turns out I'm no worse on the decks than usual without my peripheral vision, but it's amazing how badly even a little mask affects other stuff like dancing, stairs &c. How Doctor Doom copes I shall never know. I was what I believe the professionals call 'back to back' with [livejournal.com profile] augstone. But not like that. You can probably guess who picked what.
No more music, thank you and goodnight )

Otherwise - the final Ashes to Ashes. Which reminded me a little of A Matter of Life and Death - never a bad thing - but even more so of another wartime film I once saw whose name I can never remember, where a group of people who have all had near misses on the way to the docks are on a cruise liner.spoilers, obviously ) Wonderful.

On the other hand - Doctor Who. I had assumed that with Russell T Davies' departure we would also see the back of the hopeless Chris Chibnall, but no, apparently he has incriminating polaroids of Moffat too, so he doesn't just get to do one episode, he gets two! Reintroducing the Earth Reptiles! As soon as we see that he's called his Welsh village Cwmtaff, it's clear that the cluelessness and laziness we expect of Who's answer to Jeph Loeb are unimpaired, and so the episode lurches predictably from unoriginal and unconvincing jeopardy to cackhanded Issue of the Week speeches (as has been noted elsewhere - if you're doing a Middle East analogy, it might be better not to cast giant lizards as the Jews). And the redesign - ugh! So boringly human. I am of course blaming Chibnall for that, whereas all credit for the city visual at the end goes to the design team, and any good bits - the Doctor's conversation with the boy, for instance - are clearly attributable to Moffat on the final script polish. Seriously, though - eight minutes to cover an entire village with a surveillance network? That felt improbable, and since it accomplished nothing, it wasn't even an improbability which served a plot purpose. It was filler of the worst sort; you might as well just have had a chicken ride a unicycle around the church for three minutes singing 'Copacabana', that would at least have been novel.
(Who fans might also be interested to know that Radio 7 are airing a new series of Eighth Doctor stories - afraid this is the second, but I only barely caught the first myself)

*Although the ex-Menswear guest DJ did push it when he played Dolly Parton.
alexsarll: (seal)
Happy new decade, all, and it will no doubt surprise few of you to find me beginning with a Doctor Who review.
I'd expected some OTT RTD balls-out insanity like the end of the last full series, so that mostly rather quiet and contemplative little story (with a brief interlude of sh1t blowing up) rather took me by surprise. spoilers )
And yet somehow, in spite of having spent most of the second half in tears and still being slightly sniffly now, I don't feel...what's the word I want? Sated, more than satisfied. I suppose with so much changing, it couldn't have felt too much like an ending, lest a generation that has only known Davies and Tennant not come back for Moffat and Smith.

Coincidentally, the last Who audio I listened to was also about Time Lord mindworks dirty tricks - Unregenerate!. The best I'd heard in a while, helped by being eerie - a mood which audio does very well. I heard an audio book, as opposed to play, for the first time recently, Stephen King's Arthur Machen homage 'N', and even though the peculiarities of the form threw me off a little (do you really need to read out the explanation 'he paused' when the speaker can simply pause?), that was devilishly effective too. An ingeniously sadistic story, in which one obsessive-compulsive's tics really do prevent the destruction of the world. Even if the CDs take more than two hours to read 80 pages of story, I think it worked better this way, particularly as an accompaniment to the fairly OCD task of ironing. I certainly don't see how the forthcoming comics adaptation will capture the effect, not even with Alex Maleev on art.

This is probably as good a place as any to talk about Tennant's Hamlet too, isn't it? Which from a ratings point of view probably couldn't have done better than airing between the two parts of his final outing as the Doctor; it's just that I find that sort of crossed streams effect slightly trying (same as, for instance, I can't read anything else by George RR Martin until he either finishes or abandons A Song of Ice and Fire, to which I am already committed. Same as I can't read a Who book between parts of one TV story). Too often I found myself thinking, ah yes, that's one of his Doctorisms there. "What a piece of work is a man" is pretty much the "You humans!" stuff, isn't it? And so forth. Sometimes to the benefit of the play - the "readiness is all" speech works even better overlaid with the knowledge that not just Hamlet but the Doctor is headed for his end. This on top of the difficulty I already have with just watching a play which, between A-Level and Cambridge, I've probably analysed more and deeper and longer than any other work. I see the strings - and that's not a bad thing, because they make one of the most wonderfully intricate cat's cradles a human mind ever constructed. But it does leave me a long way from getting caught up in the surface narrative. In some ways that's for the best, because under the surface all the stuff that looks like flaws, isn't (and without the whole project coming off the wheels like the similarly deliberate but far less satisfactory Measure for Measure); that the play within the play is an idiotic way to prove the Ghost's credentials is a flaw in Hamlet, but a masterstroke in Hamlet.
So was it any good? I don't know. I can't know. I'm too close to the play and the perform(er/ance) to know whether they matched up. But I know it wasn't an embarrassment. I also know that Christopher Eccleston, so desperate to avoid typecasting that he bailed on Who after one series, has never got closer than the Tarantino-style OTT remake that is The Revenger's Tragedy, and that before he was the Doctor. So good on you, Tennant, and good luck with the rest of your career. You were marvellous.
alexsarll: (Default)
The main reason I don't walk all the way into town more often is that I've never found a route I liked - until now. Setting off early for [livejournal.com profile] hoshuteki's birthday, I started off through the Gillespie Park walk by the railway*, where I was able to verify that I am in fact faster than a speeding locomotive if by 'speeding' we mean 'being held between Finsbury Park and Drayton Park to regulate the service". Then through somnolent Drayton Park to Highbury, right off Liverpool Road and slide through the leafy squares of Barnsbury; this has all felt like Arthur Machen territory but once you skip over the brief busy patch of King's Cross you hit the motherlode, the little streets off the Gray's Inn Road. And there you are, in Bloomsbury, which I realise I now think of as the heart of town.

[livejournal.com profile] publicansdecoy and [livejournal.com profile] obsessive_katy got married this weekend, which is lovely and all, ditto setting aside a dedicated 'raucous drunks' table at the dinner (yes, obviously I was on it), but the masterstroke was having the wedding in a zoo! With a snow leopard and pygmy hippos and "one of the world's most mysterious mammals, the Fosca"**. Also a toastmaster, which I am now contemplating as a future career since it appears to consist of getting drunk in a tailcoat at strangers' weddings and perving on the bride. And the Black Plastic DJs. More weddings like this, please. The day was only slightly marred by the journey home, on which I had a full and frank exchange of views with a fellow who felt that throwing a pastie in my face was fair comment given I have a big nose.

Sunday, alas, began for me with the news of two Doctor Who deaths - seventies producer Barry Letts and 'Horror of Glam Rock' guest star Stephen Gately. Very sad. Mostly spent the rest of the day reading, though I did take a brief walk around the park at dusk and found myself terrified by the skies, in which the advancing mountain ranges of cloud seemed to presage apocalypse rather than the lovely clear day we've got today. I did attempt to watch Ghost Rider (or as they call it in the Philippines, Spirited Racer) and...well, it does a lot of things right. Given how Peter Fonda comes across these days, and Easy Rider, casting him as the Devil in a film about motorbikes is brilliant. And the narrator from Big Lebowski as the gravedigger who explains the plot and is blatantly a previous rider, great decision. But...in the lead, Nicolas Cage. Who as has been the case for a decade plus now, is just annoying, and can't convey any emotion bar 'faintly amusing hangdog puzzlement'. And even when, after 50 minutes, he eventually turns into the Ghost Rider, you realise that while modern special effects can do a lot of things, having as the lead character a guy with a flaming skull for a head is still slightly beyond them. On the printed page it looks great, the image makes instant sense. On screen...nothing quite looks right about it.
So I turned over to watch the Pixar documentary instead. And bless them, what lovely guys they all seem to be. Tying back to Ghost Rider, it also makes me feel I was right not to worry about the Disney takeover of Marvel, because while it is very clear from what the Pixar people say that Disney did lose its way for a while and insist on churning out bland crap, it also seems clear that, with John Lasseter now in overall charge of the creative side at Disney as well as Pixar, and having kicked out all the execs who weren't creatives, Marvel will be in good hands.
And though I still have no great desire to see Up (possibly because it's directed by the same guy as Monsters Inc, my least favourite of the Pixars I've seen), I do now really want to see Wall-E. Could anyone possibly lend me the DVD?

Neil Gaiman posted a link to a story about small-town homophobes wanting to remove gay-themed books from the local library, which would be just a normal, dismal story of people who urgently need killing (the Christian Civil Liberties Union has to be the most nonsensically-named organisation since Campaign Against P0rn0graphy And Censorship) if it weren't for the name of the town: West Bend. Everyone reading those books is already a West Bender, so what's the problem?

*This option is unavailable on match days, though - that path is closed, just another of the thousand disruptions to everyone else's life which must be made for the sake of the thrice-damned footballists.
**And porcupines! And rhinos, which terrify me. And tamarins!
alexsarll: (crest)
Over the past week I have spent time among some strange tribes - the rats and bats and strange throat-clearing old folk of the Richmond riverside, the rollerbladers and riders of Hyde Park, even the little lost sliver of Central Europe that is Mayfair (it even has the slightly substandard police - though there's maybe a hint of India to it as well; I've never seen a library with so many Wodehouse books, not even my own). And this combined with an article from the previous weekend about the death/rebirth of travel writing and set me thinking, has anyone ever done a London travel book? By which I mean, one where writers from one part of London write pieces about other areas as the foreign lands they so clearly are. It seems like an Iain Sinclair kind of project, but I think I've read all his London prose and I don't recall anything quite like this. Arthur Machen's London Adventure has something of the spirit I mean, but as one would expect from a man of a more imperial age, his project was much more centred - he spoke of "the London known to Londoners" and the lands beyond, whereas I think more in terms of separate but equal principalities under London's aegis.

There was something about the light - and later, the quality of the darkness - on Saturday night. So walking to The Melting Ice Caps/Soft Close-Ups/Soft Ice Caps (no Melting Close-Ups this time) show at Gloomy (played to a rightly rapturous crowd, some of whom I don't even know personally), I didn't necessarily want any music in my ears. Except that I had the chorus of 'We Are Golden' by Mika stuck in my head and I sure as blazes needed something to shift that, because even as someone who rather liked (most of) his first album, I find the new stuff irksomely hollow.
alexsarll: (Default)
Recently took delivery of Saint Etienne's delayed new compilation, London Conversations, and have been thinking about how unlikely a band they are. Their danceable cover of hairy old Neil Young's 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' hit in 1990, the same year as Candy Flip's not dissimilar take on one of the few non-dreadful Beatles songs, 'Strawberry Fields Forever'. Would anyone have expected either of the acts behind these apparent novelties to go on to spend 20 years as one of Britain's most cherished, most quietly trailblazing cult bands? I can't think of such a deceptive start since Bowie first came to mass attention with 'The Laughing Gnome'.
And then a detour in my musings when, last night, [livejournal.com profile] cappuccino_kid took me to see Black Box Recorder. Because don't those two bands almost form a subgenre all their own? Two male survivors, who aren't fronting the bands but who definitely need to be on stage, not backroom boys. One frontwoman called Sarah, thought a bit flat by some but recognised by indie boys of a certain stripe as an aspect of the goddess; her stage persona is all about the innocence, maybe with a little tang of experience, but you know she's no puppet. And the songs all inhabit a world of England past. The difference being, Black Box Recorder are the England you hoped was past but fear might not be (behind the stage last night, a Union Jack emblazoned with ROCK AND ROLL NOT DOLE), where Saint Etienne are the past you hope is still there just below the surface (watching the 'Hobart Paving' video, I remember that King's Cross, and I miss it).
Support was Madam acoustic; I swear she looks younger than she used to when [livejournal.com profile] hospitalsoup was in her band, five years or more ago.

Interesting that today should bring further confirmation of Stephen Fry's status as a national treasure, as I was already planning to write a little about him, having yesterday read Simon Gray's Fat Chance. Some of you may remember that in 1995, Stephen Fry, then in a play called Cell Mates, disappeared, and was briefly feared to have killed himself before turning up on the Continent (very Black Box Recorder, come to think of it). Simon Gray was the author and director of that play, and aside from having previously loved his Smoking Diaries, I was intrigued by the possibility of A Book Which Didn't Like Stephen Fry. I mean, don't get me wrong, I think he's great, but just as I enjoy Lawrence Miles' anti-Steven Moffat agenda re: Doctor Who, I tend to find devil's advocates fun. Come on, if you'd lived in the ages of faith, wouldn't you have wanted to read The Three Impostors* even if you believed, just for naughtiness' sake? So Gray was royally let down by Fry, and the front cover quote is "Makes Mommie Dearest read like a Mother's Day card" - Mark Lawson, The Guardian. Well, that should have been my first warning. Granted, Smug Slug does sometimes restrict himself to stating the bleeding obvious, but more often he misses the point entirely, and Gray himself notes that "The Guardian, ever vigilant in its defence of truth and the decencies, published an article quoting the unfavourable reviews, neglecting to mention that the Guardian's own reviewer had written both warmly and intelligently about the play." And if there is a villain here it is the media, and the media's delight in reporting what the media is saying without ever deigning to return to primary sources - something of which we see even more these days simply because there's more media and more pages and airtime to fill, with results I'm sure I need hardly list and decry again. Gray does accuse Fry of certain crimes - a tendency to play himself, for instance, whether he is meant to be playing someone else, or just honestly being himself. Well, that's hardly news, and nor is it delivered in terms significantly more damning than Gray uses of himself in The Smoking Diaries. Fry comes across more as a sad figure than a mad one, and more mad than bad - and since he's come out as a manic depressive, none of this really does much to contradict his own acknowledgment of his situation. Part of me's disappointed that there is no anti-Fry book, but mostly I just think 'bless'. And posthumously bless cantankerous old Gray, too. Though the real hero of the tale, would you believe, is Rik Mayall.

*Which reminds me, [livejournal.com profile] sbp - any joy locating my copy of the Arthur Machen novel of the same name?
alexsarll: (crest)
Withnail & I cast, director reunited for self-indulgent but fun radio show in which they talk about the making of the film. Bit of a disconnect for those us who now mainly associate Paul McGann's voice with Doctor Who audios.

The only downside of weeks off is not having 52 of them a year. Have been contentedly moseying around London, reading in parks, being inexplicably good at bowling and watching others prove somewhat disappointing as trappers. Only the North so far - from Golders Green to Barnsbury, but even that has so much in it (Arthur Machen knew that London was a sort of infinity, even if he was hampered by not having the word 'fractal' yet and having to talk around it); I think I'll head West later, that being my terra incognita and my having no plans today past the haircut.
The MP3 player is really coming into its own on these wanderings, too - whether it's Stars on the nightbus, or Beirut and St Etienne in the sun. Not Los Campesinos! so much, though; they were my most-played for a while, but since I got them on the DLR as we emerged from the Bank tunnel and into the sunshine pre-Tubewalk...well, that was just too perfect.

Finally saw Robin Ince last night; I realise I'm a couple of years behind the comedy curve here but he's bloody brilliant. And before the gig, our new leader cycled past the venue. It may have been for the best that none of the acts saw him.

Another day, another attempt to undermine the BBC - this time by claiming that Head of Fiction Jane Tranter is some form of localised Stalin, intent on asserting control over all BBC drama and comedy output. Nobody seems to have noticed the key flaw in this scenario; almost every piece of British TV fiction worth watching comes from the Tranter empire, and it's not as if there's a uniformity among them. A little too much emphasis on 'feelings' and 'human interest' in shows which should be about something more interesting, perhaps, but that's endemic across UK and US TV, so I'm hesitant to blame its expression in BBC programming on one woman.
alexsarll: (bernard)
Been a while since I woke up in the afternoon! Testament to the majesty of Soul Mole, I would say.

You ever read one of those print-on-demand books? I can see the appeal of the idea, certainly - there are books where it doesn't make economic sense to have a warehouse full of ready stock, but where the long tail means you can make money by having one ready to roll when someone flashes the cash. I was glad to see some when I realised Westminster libraries, presumably on the same jag that led them recently to acquire what looks suspiciously like the complete works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, had bought in a couple of POD editions of stories by the great Arthur Machen (acquaintance of Wilde, inspiration to Lovecraft, and inadvertent originator of the legend of the Angels of Mons). One of them I hadn't read; 'The Terror'. Which (in with the mixture of essential conservatism, structural imbalance, genuinely queasy horror and strange, pagan poetry one expects from Machen) manages, with its references to Huvelius' De Facinore Humano, to anticipate Ken MacLeod's conception of the True Knowledge - a philosophy founded on the most pessimistic cynicism about human nature which breeds utopian results. But, typically, I digress. The edition was not the one I had on my Facebook bookshelf, but one from www.kessinger.net and blow me, it was a disaster. I don't mean the cheapo production or binding, I expected that from POD. I mean the text. Words change spelling within a sentence, even the word which gives the story its title sometimes becoming 'tenor'. Paragraphs break
at random points in sentences. or punctuation appears where it is not wanted,, or already placed. It is, as best I can tell, the same text available free online here - though in an appropriately Machenical turn of events, such errors are, for no reason on which one can put one's finger, somehow less of an affront on screen.
Still, enough - the publishers distracted me from the text once, I should not let them so totally distract my account from it too. Over to Machen for the close, as he explains why conventional ideas of detection tend to let us down when confronted with the unprecedented:
"You can't believe what you don't see: rather, you can't see what you don't believe...mere facts, without the correlating idea, are nothing and lead to no conclusion."

Who could have guessed that "one of the world's most wanted men" would be a nasty piece of work called James Bulger? Makes me wonder whether Jon Venables and Robert Thompson really were just children-gone-wrong; I'm thinking in terms of a story about a time traveller's embarrassment at going back to the early twentieth century and bumping off a perfectly innocent baby who happened to share the name Adolf Hitler.
(In other dead child news, the McCanns' latest attempt to point the finger at anyone but themselves would seem to implicate cult superhero and Rorschach inspiration The Question. Who did always come across as a bit strange, but this really doesn't strike me as his style)

Anyone looking for a smallish, scuzzy but workable venue in North London - I can make a recommendation (if not an unreserved one) of Bar Monsta in Camden. I was there to see the Indelicates on Wednesday and while the sound wasn't perfect for the live bands (a bit of mic trouble, mainly), I've seen much worse in venues with better reps. The band themselves were charming as ever, opening with what I gradually realised were the lyrics to 'Breakin' The Law' over the intro of their own 'Fun Is For The Feeble-Minded'. Later I feared they were about to sell out by doing an encore, but having hushed the crowd's applause, Julia whistled briefly, then went back to putting her keyboard away. Heroine.

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