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

Interesting how they decided to get all the Doctor Who fanservice out of the way over the course of one weekend. So the Comic Relief special not only had the promised dual Pond action, but two Doctors as well, and then on Saturday we got to see Matt Smith being Christopher Isherwood in gloriously gay detail. Neither broadcast had the least bit of substance, obviously, but both were reasonably charming. Interesting to see batrachian Toby wotsisface, formerly seen as the Dream Lord, once again playing Matt Smith's unappealing alter-ego, and Lindsay Duncan again playing an unhappy sort of mother to him. Anyway, because that's not quite enough Doctor for one weekend, I finished off The Holy Terror too. Which manages to move from gleefully silly satire on religion, through horror and metafictional Invisibles-style shenanigans, to a terribly sad meditation on time travel, without shortchanging any of the genres.

Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London is not, contrary to the way some places are marketing it, his debut novel. I read a couple of novels by him back in the 1990s but they're not talked about in polite society because they were Doctor Who New Adventures. Very good ones too, though being a callow youth I was mean about the first at the time. Cyberpunk had no place in Who, I piously declared. Silly oaf. Now he's one of the two classic writers I'd most like to get back on the series. Aaronovitch himself is of course far too sensible to disown his Who past, and Hell, would you distance yourself from Doctor Who if you'd written the best Dalek story ever? Of course not. Anyway, Rivers of London is the start of a new series which, in outline, looked dangerously close to China Mieville's Kraken: a strange little department of the Met investigates occult crime and its links to the hidden history of London. They feel very different, though; Aaronovitch's book is lighter and more straightforward, without feeling dumbed down. It just...had a more straightforward story to tell in the first place. It's in love with the city, and it's funny when it needs to be yet not afraid to get serious, and I romped through it in next to no time. My only real objection was that it took the characters half the book to work out whodunnit, something I'd picked up before the end of the first chapter - and these are people who should know the relevant material even better than I do.
(Speaking of the old New Adventures writers, Paul Cornell's just wrapped up his British Batman miniseries Knight and Squire, and as ever when Cornell does Britishness, it was lovely. An interesting take on the Joker, too. Too often, the Joker is simply a psycho. The best writers - Gaiman, Cornell, Moore - have generally been the ones who could make him at once comic and terrifying, simply because they were better writers than the usual hacks so they could make a tricky mix come off. But Cornell finds a new angle. Cornell's Joker is the guy who thinks he's funny, the loud bully who hates nothing more than a joke which is actually funny and which he's too dumb to get. I'm not sure how much mileage it would have in another story, but for a character used so often, and usually badly, it's amazing nobody else has hit on it before)

Things unrelated to Doctor Who: much the usual, really, albeit somewhat less of the boozing and somewhat more of the QNIs. There was the relaunch of Black Plastic, though, which was excellent. Since the Silver Bullet opened on Finsbury Park station, I had been there twice, both times for gigs I probably would have skipped if they hadn't been so local. But with Black Plastic, finally something I would have attended no matter what was stupidly convenient, and there was free whiskey for early arrivals. Win. It's a smaller venue, but not uncomfortably so by any means, and I think it suits the music. I'm looking forward to more.

That Kinks book I read sent me to Spotify in search of Preservation, mentioned in hushed tones as a grand folly of Ray Davies' wilderness years. And yes, musically it's dreadful. But the lyrics of the title track are timely:
The people were scared
They didn't know where to turn
They couldn't see any salvation
From the hoods and the spivs
And the crooked politicians
Who were cheating and lying to the nation
Crucial detail - they didn't know where to turn. I'm seeing a lot of people retreating into cosy tribalism over the Spending Review, choosing to believe that if Brown had somehow survived then things would be very different. Which may be a nice dream, but ignores his pre-election rhetoric and New Labour's record. Demonisation and squeezing of welfare claimants, Murdoch-approved bullying of the BBC, cossetting wealthy tax evaders - all straight from the New Labour playbook. The tuition fees now ballooning so obscenely were an introduction of New Labour's first term, their supposed golden age. Hell, even Ed Miliband's new non-New Labour are still holding disappointingly close to the idiotic consensus of toughness on the deficit, failing to distance themselves from their predecessors, failing to see that some economists a little more substantial than George and Gordon, people like Keynes and Krugman, offer a way at once kinder and more effective.

What else? Watched Mark Gatiss' intriguing adaptation of HG Wells' First Men in the Moon, which looked like it had made a little money go a long way. I expect we'll be seeing a lot more of that sort of make-do attitude given the BBC cuts snuck through in the Review. Had a first game of occult Nazis vs GI Joe killfest Tannhauser, which I suspect will be even better once we know the rules but was great fun even when played at retard level (at one stage I said "I'm going to move this man here and do shooty at that man." I hadn't even been drinking). Oh, and I picked up the first comic in a while which I've felt the need to post about. It's not that there haven't been any good comics lately, it's just that most of them have been in series which have been good for 30, 60, 120 issues now and are continuing to be good in much the same way - hardly worth posting about. And complaining about the disappointments always risks turning one into this guy (though it has to be said that hardcore Spider-Man fans are the comics fan's comics fans - who but the geekiest would look at all the heroes available, and choose as their avatar that schmuck Peter Parker?). Paul Cornell, whom some of you will know from his mostly excellent Doctor Who work, also writes some very good comics. Probably the best of which was his Captain Britain and MI:13, tragically cancelled in large part because nobody outside Britain was reading the thing. So he's gone over to DC and somehow persuaded them to let him do a miniseries with Knight & Squire, the British Batman & Robin, which is even more British. Here's the first page, with the opening line "Tch! What a palaver about a bit of how's-your-father!" Which I suppose means I can end on a certain note of "there'll always be an England" consolation. Heavens know I need it.

I've had a couple of serendipitous library finds recently. Having mentioned Seth Fisher a couple of weeks back, I came across the last collection of his work I hadn't read at the weekend. Which meant I had Batman: Snow there to read as the snow whirled down this week. As with his other work, it's only really worth it for the art - who else would ever have given Alfred bunny pyjamas and an expressive combover? JH Williams III is credited as co-plotter, but on this evidence should stick to the artwork too, because I'm still not convinced that Mr Freeze can ever be anything more than DC's second best cold-themed villain.
A couple of weeks earlier, I'd finally found Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places, which came out a couple of years back. I've known Rob on and off since school and, unlike some acquaintances whose rise to celebrity status is face-crunchingly irksome (mentioning no names, Rick the Fister) his emergence as a sort of all-weather public intellectual has been as gratifying as it is richly deserved. This wander around Britain in search of wildness - and a definition of what 'wildness' might even mean - was, for me, a much more satisyfing book than his debut, Mountains of the Mind, and I was left wondering why it hadn't been picked up for TV.
So in Saturday's paper, there's Rob explaining how it's been narrowed down to Essex, and filmed, and will be on TV tonight. Which is handy. I also note that immediately afterwards is a show about the different orders of infinity - a concept I can just about handle, except that it's narrated by Steven Berkoff, which seems unduly sadistic.
(The Wild Places was also one of of two consecutive non-fiction books I read to mention Nevil Maskelyne. Not either of the two stage magicians of that name, of whom I am aware through the wartime illusionism and being contemporaries of David Devant, although I can never quite keep them separate in my head - but the Astronomer Royal at the opening of Richard Holmes' Age of Wonder, their presumable ancestor. What a dynasty!)

Also: one of the problems with/interesting side effects of Google Alerts is that you're kept informed of the activities of namesakes. I know an awful lot more than I used to about the fireman Alan Moore, for instance. And today, I learn of a stem cell scientist Alan Moore who is involved with a project called 'Regenesis', also the title of a Swamp Thing collection - albeit not one of Moore's, but the six Veitch issues which immediately followed him.

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

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

"New romantic dark electro post-punk discotheque" Black Plastic returns tonight, after far too long away, and if you're not at Latitude/San Diego/Nuisance, I strongly recommend it. I am certainly in the mood for a dance right now; sometimes even the more assured among us feel everything getting on top of one rather, especially when looking at the bank balance and realising, actually, one is a bit skint. There couldn't have been a better time for Entourage to turn up as a reminder of the crucial mindset: "Something will turn up. It always does." Now, I'm just waiting for my own equivalent to Vince's 'phonecall from Scorsese. There's a couple of jobs I've applied for which look pretty good, but since it's only the pay I object to with this unemployment business, rather than the hours, that Euromillions rollover would go down even better.

Finsbury Park station is having some 'improvement' works on the entrance I normally use, not to do anything practical, just to better the 'ambience'.
Which means getting to the Tube takes me another couple of minutes.
Which means I find it harder to avoid the sort of locals with whom I don't want to associate - couple of days ago there was a bad transvestite (at least, I hope she was a bad transvestite) pushing a wheelchair full of clothes while periodically blowing a whistle, and if I wanted that kind of Royston Vasey crap, I could have stayed in Derby.
Which also means I have to pass the Annoying Billboards. When the Christian Party were campaigning in the elections (and thank heavens that even if the Nazis got in, these scum didn't - they have nearly two millennia extra experience in persecuting Jews and gays), my nearest billboard for them was here. Recently, it's had a tourist board ad with the slogan "everything that makes Mexico magical remains the same" over a picture of an Aztec temple. So, you're saying that Mexico still has human sacrifice? Think I'll pass, thanks. And now, it's ads for one of those religious revival meetings. Though at least it's the one called Dominion. I have no idea whether this differs theologically from any of the similar enterprises, but I first became aware of it coming home the day after a B Movie night at which we'd been dancing to the Sisters song of the same name in an environment guaranteed to blow any evangelical's tiny little mind.
Supposedly the Wells Terrace entrance will be finished by 'mid-July'. Well, I make it mid-July and it doesn't look ready yet.
Elsewhere in the city, Oxford Street is starting to alarm me. There are ever fewer real shops there, ever more fly-by-night places one would expect somewhere far less salubrious, yet still the crowds graze it on some kind of retail autopilot. I was only there to engage in my own little spot of vulture capitalism, checking out Borders which is closing down and promising that everything is half price. Except that everything in certain sections - SF and comics among them - has already been shipped off to surviving branches. Really not the spirit of the thing, is it? Still, afterwards, in Bloomsbury and already half-cut, as one of the second hand shops packed away the outside tables, I was just in time to pluck out an Olaf Stapledon and a Baron Corvo of which I'd never even seen either in the flesh before. Literary acquisition urge cheaply sated, and in a far more civilised environment too.

The latest issue of top zombie despairathon The Walking Dead also contains, at no extra charge, the whole first issue of Chew. In spite of the name, Chew is nothing to do with zombies. You know all those 'cop with gimmick' shows on TV? It's one of those, about a cop who can psychically understand the complete history of anything he eats. Also, there's a moderately amusing satire of the war on drugs in that it's set in a USA where chicken has been banned - except supposedly on account of bird flu, which now looks like total topicality fail. It's moderately amusing. It's by two guys whose names mean nothing to me. And yet it's apparently selling like hot cakes, even to people who are not regular comics readers. And I genuinely have no idea why.
In a different way, DC's Wednesday Comics is a weird one. It's the size of a normal comic when you buy it, but then folds out to broadsheet size - and it's printed on newspaper. I think it's meant to be reminiscent of the 'funny pages' from US papers of yore, but given the closest I ever got to that was the Funday Times, it's a bit lost on me. Still, some of it is charmingly nostalgic stuff, fifties Silver Age stylings without being as badly written - the Supergirl and Green Lantern strips are charming, but best of the bunch is Neil Gaiman returning to the Metamorpho family, albeit with a much lighter touch than we saw in Sandman. Problem is, if this is also aimed at lapsed comics readers, the Superman and Batman strips are real misfires - and the latter is on the front cover. Brian Azzarello has demonstrated before that, while he is quite well aware of the ways in which Batman is a typical noir protagonist, he does not grasp the ways in which Batman differs from them. Same here, and in something otherwise so all-ages, the (admittedly mild) swearing really jars. In the Superman story by no-mark John Arcudi, meanwhile, we get a page in which Superman doesn't do anything super, and then Batman dismissively tells him to get some "super-prozac".

Theory: neckties were not an echo of the Roman soldier's neck-rag in the past, but a precursor of earphone leads in the future. Which is why the period of their die-off coincides so closely with the gradual arrival of that for which they played John the Baptist.

Friday: to the Wilmington, where you must not step past the green pillar with your drink because of 'Residents'. No, not in the sense that eyeball-headed monsters will get you. Well, I don't think so. This in spite of the fact that the other side of the same residential block is a square solely occupied by teenage girls getting raucously drunk in a manner which would doubtless provoke an appalled Skins reference if the papers got hold of it. The other risk of being outside is that you get girls at that stage where you genuinely can't tell if they're mixed-race or just really overdid the fake tan trying to get you along to Venus 'nightclub' (and it shouldn't need saying, but that's arguably NSFW). Do they really get much success touting for that outside indie gigs?
The band bringing the drums were late, and aren't quite cute enough to make up for the lack of songs. Because of their lateness, no soundchecks: myfirstkitchen and her Maffickers are having monitor trouble but sound fine in the crowd. However, Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring seem to suffer, their usual magic tragically absent on a day when our hearts were full of spring. I decide that although I ought to check out headliners Cats on Fire, particularly now I've finally got it straight in my head that they aren't middle-class student wankers Cats in Paris (three of the top 10 Google results for that phrase lead you to blogs written by people I know called Steve), this is not the time, and hightail it to the Noble, where the Addlestones is now 10p more expensive, and tastes soapy.
Saturday: fugitivemotel's engagement party. The transition from the glorious, barely-even-evening sun of the walk down to the gentle gloom of the bar leaves me feeling suddenly sleepy, and I initially worry that the rape jokes are not giving his fiancee the best impression of his friends, but by evening's end we're siding with her in an argument, which should count for a lot.
Sunday: join the second half of a genteel Soho pub crawl compered by my_name_is_anna. Well, I think it's genteel, but I'm only half as drunk as the rest of them. Soho really is horrifically gentrified these days though, isn't it? Then up to the Noble again. Pints still priced too high, but no longer soapy. That's something.

Neil Gaiman's 'Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?' concluded perfectly; in spite of the title, I was reminded less of Alan Moore's 'Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?' than of the afterlife metaphysics his next novel, Jerusalem will apparently propose. One imperfection, though - you know those 'Got milk?' ads? There's one in here with Chris Brown, talking about how "the protein helps build muscle". Muscle you can use for beating your girlfriend Rihanna black and blue, for instance. Given some of the daft things DC have censored at the last minute (Superman with a beer, for instance) you'd think this could have been pulled.
At the other end of the Gaiman/Batman axis, I finally found in the library the first volume of Mark Waid's The Brave and the Bold, not as Bat-centric as the old title - and like most Waid it's good, undemanding superhero fun. Which makes a mockery of DC editorial's claims that Vertigo and the DC Universe are separate by having a plot turning around the Book of Destiny, and even a scene with Supergirl and Lobo meeting him in his garden. Next time John Constantine gets left out of a big mystical crossover, they're going to need a new excuse.
It's also the first time I've seen more than a couple of panels of the new Blue Beetle, but he seems like a nice kid, and if he was always this entertaining I can understand why people are upset about his title getting cancelled.
Over at Marvel, Apparitions and Ultraviolet writer Joe Ahearne spins off from Mark Millar's Fantastic Four and spoilers the end of his Wolverine in Fantastic Force, whose backmatter has something rather more interesting than the usual set of sketches - a first draft of the script, from comparison of which with the final issue we can see exactly how much a writer new to comics gets smacked around by editorial and told no, you cannot use that character, or have this one doing that. Worth a look even if you have no direct interest in the comic itself, though that's not bad.

Finally saw the hilarious Superbad on Friday; I loved it, though being shown it by a female friend I could see that her amusement was purer, in that it wasn't tempered with that terrible recognition anyone who's ever been a teenage boy must feel. Mentioning it to augstone later, he thought I was asking if he'd seen Superman; I wasn't, but if his secret identity were McLovin instead of Clark Kent, wouldn't that be glorious? Also on Friday night: got lost in Emirates, impersonated a chessboard, saw Sex Tourists/Doe Face Lilian/The Firm. As is traditional on Holloway Road love-ins, the roster also included one band I didn't know; as is traditional, they were pants, ie so pants that even being pretty girls in knee-length socks covering 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' couldn't save them. Let's hope tradition stops before the Gaff burns down, though.
Saturday and Sunday also fun, but Monday...that Monday was overacting. It hammered its point home with a scenery-chewing excess of Mondayness. I did not approve.

Glen David Gold's Carter Beats The Devil was, quite deservedly if unusually, a success both with the general public and with people I know. His follow-up has been delayed and delayed, but should finally be with us this year. Except, just like various bands have had exclusive distribution deals with various chains (mainly in the States), in the UK Waterstone's get Sunnyside in July, and everyone else has to wait 'til Autumn. What makes this even stranger - that's the hardback, ie the prestige edition aimed at people who have money to spare and really can't wait for the book. Which comes out in the US in May, and can be pre-ordered from amazon.com for $17.79. That's not quite the bargain it would have been two years ago, but if you're into the book enough to get a hardback in July, for about the same price you can get one in May instead. So what do Waterstone's and the UK publishers get out of this, except for winding up other booksellers?

Comics links: have a bunch of Grant Morrison rarities, including Batman and Superman text stories from 1986 - two decades before he got to do definitive runs in the main titles - and Alan Moore interviewed on the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Obama, and his grimoire-in-progress:
"We want it to be a lot of fun and we also want it to be exactly like the way you would have imagined a book to magic to be when you were a small child and had first heard of such things."
As someone who has attempted to read Crowley, that sounds like just what Doctor Dee ordered.

I'd been looking forward to Tin Man, a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz starring Alan Cumming, Callum Keith Rennie and lovely, lovely Zooey Deschanel. Not only was I disappointed, but I don't even have much to add to USA Today's disappointment when they say that "Ambitious and intriguing though it may be, Tin Man is simply too long, too grim and too determined to impose a Lord of the Rings universe-saving quest on top of a simpler, gentler story." It perhaps doesn't help that Alan Moore so recently finished showing how you could reinvent that story to a darker end, so long as you had a point, rather than just mashing together various fashionable SF and fantasy tropes into a world with no thematic consistency or resonance, much less plausibility.

So, in a clear effort to confound the suggestion that Final Crisis is just a bloated and less compelling rewrite of his own JLA: Rock of Ages, it was nice to see Grant Morrison ( spoilers ) Really - he's better than this, and he must know that.
Also in comics this week (and last, I missed a pick-up):
- delightful Anglophile teen comedy Blue Monday finally returns! Hoorah!
- Warren Ellis makes an ill-advised attempt to tie Doktor Sleepless to Freakangels!
- Pete Wisdom kills furries!

The Natural History museum is far too interactive and accessible nowadays. If I want a moving, roaring dinosaur, I shall go to a theme park, and for all that I respect Zoids and Grimlock, they do not belong in the dinosaur room of a major museum.
The glyptodon (it's an armadillo the size of a small car!), the strokeable meteoric iron and some of the loopier gem formations are still lovely, though.

Miserable bloody day out there, isn't it? Although it's stretching it to call it a day at all when it's this blank - it's more like a gap of non-time. I would call it archetypally Sundayish had yesterday not been cut from the same cloth - although yesterday I probably exacerbated matters by braving the bad bits of Ealing. There are some lovely pubs down the Broadway end, and of course the studios which gave us Ealing comedy, but at the other end of town it's an Ealing tragedy, whether the desolation of Gunnersbury Park or Tudor Row, which true to its name is the most soul-sappingly mock Tudor street I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. I'm going to have to leave the house at some point today, but I'm putting it off for as long as possible. Thank heavens for a four-week comics backlog to keep me entertained (on days like this, comics somehow do a better job than prose of lifting the spirits - I would say that maybe it's just all that colour, except that the black-and-white Wasteland seemed to work just as well). Still can't believe that Batman RIP got mainstream press coverage, though - not that I'm dissing Brubaker's Death of Captain America storyline, but that was pretty much what it said on the tin - a story about Cap's death, a story which can be taken as a political comment on our times. Whereas Batman RIP is Morrison musing on Batman through the traditional Morrison obsessions of identity, Eastern mysticism, order and chaos - or alternately, musing on them using Batman as a tool. It's a good read, but it's not going to convert anyone to comics (except maybe a confirmed psychonaut), and I pity any journos hoping to get an op ed out of it.

You know when you feel like you somehow missed the weekend? Last weekend, I didn't get that. Between Batman and barbecue and British Bulldog, not to mention trees and croquet and dark secrets and lashings of ginger beer, I came as near as I've managed in a while to living without dead time. If I have a regret, it's not the demise of a long-serving shirt (it met as fine an end as any of us can hope for, and I've always been a great believer in the noble art of dying well) - it's just that I forgot to listen to 'The First Big Weekend of the Summer'.

I was introduced to the myth of John Kennedy Toole years back; though he wrote the scabrous, satirical romp of a very nearly Great American Novel that is A Confederacy of Dunces, he never lived to see it published - his suicide at least implicitly blamed on the publishers' rejection. What the myth never mentioned was that he'd written another book, The Neon Bible - and somehow when the Arcade Fire borrowed that name for their second album, I never learned the source. So when I saw a book by him, with that name, in a charity shop - well, no deliberation was needed.
I recently read The Neon Bible, and I now know why the myth omits it; it's bobbins. Forgivable bobbins - it's juvenilia, after all - but bobbins nonetheless. As a tale of hick life, it's pretty much a PG-rated And The Ass Saw The Angel, which is not what the world needs, is it now?

I've now moved on to something far more powerful - Greg Bear's latest, City at the End of Time. The jacket quotes big up his hard SF credentials, but the debts to Arthur C Clarke and Olaf Stapledon which that and the title imply - and make no mistake, they are massive - are easily equalled by the echoes of Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and Harrison's Viriconium. The grandfathers of slipstream, in other words - and not just in terms of the tone with which Bear describes that majestic, crumbling city in which the last humans live out their long, forgetful lives. For some of those last humans dream of a time long past, and in a Seattle which may or may not be our world's, three modern people dream of the future...
Which is not a technique I'd normally like, because it smacks too much of a targetted reader-identification character, and I almost always hate them - modern humans lower the tone. But whether or not Bear was nudged in this direction, he can carry it off, capturing that sense of entropy, captivity and impending doom so often remarked upon these days, offering an explanation for it. One which ties in everything from the Indonesian 'garden of Eden' to all those typos in books these days - and there was me thinking it was just laziness, illiteracy and cheapskate publishers.
(Though in City at the End of Time, I should note, I have yet to spot a single error bar one of those maddening American references to a paper apparently called the London Times. It is perversely, brilliantly well-edited for a product of this entropic age)

Doomsday is a very odd film. Neil "Dog Soldiers" Marshall clearly wanted to pay homage to some of his favourite films - Escape from New York, Mad Max, maybe even traces of Excalibur and Lord of the Rings. So he strung together a load of scenes which would fit in those films, and then decided to worry about it making sense later. And then forgot that bit. It's entertaining enough to watch once, with drinks, in company. And it at least explains how Rhona Mitra's so unflappable in Boston Legal - once you've fought feral cannibals and armoured executioners, even James Spader doesn't seem that scary. I'm a little puzzled as to why it needed to be set in the future, though - it portrays a horrifically overcrowded London where the public transport is at a standstill, and Glasgow reduced to a state of barbarian savagery, but that only needed the datestamp 'Saturday night'.