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

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.

"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.

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 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.

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 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.

publicansdecoy and 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!

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, 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 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, sbp - any joy locating my copy of the Arthur Machen novel of the same name?

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.