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

Interesting Bright Club for June, on 'Science and the Media'. Not all of the acts had that much to do with the ostensible theme (plenty, including Strawberry and Cream, just went for innuendo-going-on-outright-filth, not that there's anything wrong with that), but those who did, the tech journalists...the self-disgust was palpable. They don't enjoy producing the reports which annoy Ben Goldacre any more than Ben Goldacre enjoys reading them. I doubt the editors and picture editors enjoy demanding them, either. It's just another of those messed-up Wire-style systems which screws everybody without anyone even enjoying the process. Which obviously we should have known in the first place, but the confirmation is welcome nonetheless. My other recent night out raised questions of its own: how can Jonny Cola, who has grown into a pretty good frontman, be so atrocious at karaoke? Why does a performance poet who looks like the poet in question does think that his work will in any way be enhanced by nudity? And why must the St Aloysius close when, based on my three visits there, it is a home to such reliably surreal entertainments?

I've started watching Castle, even though it isn't very good. A bestselling crime writer helps the cops investigate crime? Exactly the sort of 'high'-concept tosh the US networks churn out all the time. But when the writer is played by Nathan Fillion...yes, I'd rather he were still making Firefly. From interviews I've seen, so would he - he says he'd buy the rights if he won the state lottery and fund production himself. But, alas, he is not. So if we want to see him on screen, Castle is what we've got. And the bastard's charming enough that he can make me overlook everything I don't like about the show (which is pretty much everything else, especially the James Patterson cameo as himself) and keep going. Though I may just be saying that because at times Fillion seems to be auditioning for the role of me. Hell, I'd give him the job.
Because man cannot live by imported US crime dramas on Five alone, even though the summer schedulers seem to think otherwise, I also continued with my project of watching all the surviving Who I've not seen. This time: the surprisingly good Enlightenment, probably the most eerily Sapphire & Steel the show has ever been. Though I say that having only watched the special edition, which uses new CGI and cuts about 20 minutes from the running time - and you don't feel you've missed anything in those minutes, because old Who stories can be added to that long list of things which, though great, no one ever wished longer. As for what Eighties special effects made of the haunting central image of sailing ships racing majestically through space, I dread to think.

And then there's comics. Oh, comics. I love you, but you're getting me down. I bought three new comics yesterday, and bear in mind these were not just random, flailing picks, but carefully chosen on the basis of the writers' past work. Well, two of them were. The one I pretty much suspected was going to be dreadful was Brightest Day Aftermath: The Search for Swamp Thing. The title's a hint, isn't it? But it features the return of John Constantine to the mainstream DC universe, where he originated but from which he has spent many years separated by editorial fiat. And that's the problem here - it's not a comic which seems driven by a story the writer needed to tell, but by editorial - or maybe, worse, branding. Even since the preview DC had in almost all of their comics last month, details have changed, dialogue and art been altered to bring in different characters, and that is very seldom a good sign. And the writer charged with handling this exercise, Jonathan Vankin, comes in with this weird Ray Winstone-meets-Dick van Dyke speech style for Constantine. It is, in short, hideous, and does not bode well for DC's forthcoming universe-wide relaunch, which again looks to be an editorial decision at best. And in the wake of which all the other DC titles are winding down with stories which feel all the more pointless for looking likely to be erased from continuity in three months. Though Paul Cornell's current Superman tale felt pretty bloody pointless even without that looming. You may know Paul Cornell from his many fine Doctor Who stories, or 'Father's Day', but he's also done some very good comics. Having spent a year handling Action Comics (the original Superman comic) without Superman, he'd told an excellent little epic in which Lex Luthor wandered the DC world, meeting its other great villains, in pursuit of the power with which to rival Superman. Except then Superman came back in for the conclusion in issue 900, and everything fell apart, and now we've got a story in which Superman and his brand extensions are fighting the boring nineties villain Doomsday (back then he killed Superman - guess what, it didn't stick) and *his* new brand-extension clones. This is the sort of comic which makes people give up on comics.
And then, away from DC, there's Ultimate Spider-Man, which Brian Michael Bendis has been writing for 160 issues (plus various little spin-offs). And aside from occasional blips, he's kept it interesting that whole time. His alternate take on Peter Parker is still in his teens and, fundamentally, is less of a slappable schmuck than the classic take. Bad things happen to him, he makes bad decisions like teenagers do, but he never seems quite the self-sabotaging arse that the classic and film versions of the character usually do. But now...( Can you spoiler a story called The Death of Spider-Man? )

I'm surprised more hasn't been made of Mick Harvey leaving the Bad Seeds. Mick's been working with Nick since The Boys Next Door, and I've always wondered how much of what we think of as Cave is in fact Harvey, particularly when listening to Harvey's other projects. I suppose now we get to find out.

Final Crisis: Superman Beyond's second issue confirms that this is the comic Final Crisis should have been. Yes, Grant Morrison is reusing his old tropes again - breaking the fourth wall, Limbo, the self-evolving hyperstory, creators trapped in creation - but here there's a manic, fizzing joy and ingenuity I'm not getting from the parent Rock of Ages reprise. Some great 3D sequences, too - though should you happen, as I did, to look out of the window with your glasses still on, it brings a real moment of Crisis terror - RED SKIES!
Elsewhere in comics, Bendis' Dark Avengers may not have any lines to equal the best of Warren Ellis' Thunderbolts run, but in so far as it's taking that series' concept - Marvel's biggest bastards given the keys to the kingdom - to the next level, I'm very much interested. Thunderbolts, meanwhile, has gone deeper and darker under Andy Diggle, and this issue includes a considerably more substantial Barack Obama appearance than that meaningless fluff-piece of a Spider-Man back-up strip, albeit to considerably less fanfare.

Have been left with a nagging sensation that I've not used my leisure to best advantage this week, to the extent that I started getting quite angry with myself/the world and had to go wander the British Museum for a while to calm down. Silly, really - even aside from the nebulous business of Seeing Nice People, I've watched another Losey/Pinter/Bogarde masterpiece, Accident; seen the Soft Close-Ups and Mr Solo; and made a reasonably good start on Ulysses, so it's not as if I'm flicking myself off to Trisha just yet.

I know list articles are intrinsically pointless, and I know they're designed to provoke quibbling, so I'm not going to get up in arms about the omissions from the Guardian's Novels You Must Read, or the times where they've chosen a book which isn't the author's best. And I should be glad, I suppose, that one of the seven sections was science fiction and fantasy. But since when was Kavalier & Clay, The Man Who Was Thursday or The Wasp Factory science fiction or fantasy? They may not be dull enough to be literary fiction, but none of them takes place in a world that is not the consensus version of this one - except in so far as they are not true. If we say that the fictional comics in Chabon's book make it an alternate world, then so does the fictional MP in The Line of Beauty, and down that line every book bar the most tiresomely domestic becomes SF. Which would amuse me at least a little, it's true, but is patently nonsense.

Granted, the last few times we were in the Noble we moaned, only partly in jest, that there were people drinking there, sitting in our seats, and generally lowering the tone. But if nothing else, shouldn't they have secured its future, meant it wouldn't have to be up for sale again, leave it in a position where one person's illness doesn't force us to resort to a nearby 'pub' no longer even fit to be named in this journal lest by doing so I pollute the servers and screens?
That's the thing about dark times - they're dark on every level. You can do your best to ignore the geopolitics, and heavens know it's tempting, but then you find your local's deserted you, your supermarket's discontinued your favourites, your shoelaces just won't stay tied. Once the entropy takes hold, it's as above, so below.
And then, of course, there's a reversal of fortunes in the war in heaven. And suddenly you see a pug acting the fool and a terrier with the yawns, and the moon's impossibly big and watching over Stoke Newington, and the setting sun lights the clouds behind the Gothic revival water tower like Camelot never fell.

I've finally finished a manga! Libraries have a nasty habit of getting enough volumes to hook me, and then never buying the rest - or in the case of Koike & Kojima books going one worse and, as sadistic as the stories, getting in the first couple - and then a random smattering of later volumes, just to tempt me. But well done Westminster, for completing their Death Note collection, even getting in the fairly superfluous companion and offcuts collection How to Read. Even leaving that aside, I can't deny there's some fat could be trimmed from the 12 volumes of the story proper, and that it never entirely gets to grip with the questions its central premise raises (vigilante killings of criminals by means of a magic notebook - I'm in favour, myself, but there's an emotional weight to the question which never quite makes the page). It does, however, manage some real moments of shock as it twists and turns, and one of those curious little tropes I always love is the ridiculously convoluted fight scene between incredibly smart antagonists, each of them revealing that they've anticipated the other's anticipation of their anticipation of...and so on. Consider the Seventh Doctor at his most Machiavellian, or Vandal Savage versus Resurrection Man in DC One Million, or Iron Man versus Black Panther in Enemy of the State II. Consider even, as comic incarnation of the type, the time-travelling fight scene in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey - Death Note is fit to stand among them.

Meanwhile in Western comics vigilante news, Garth Ennis' epic Punisher run has concluded. Now there's a comic prepared to address its moral issues, albeit one which never collapses into the pathetic hand-wringing which has often haunted the series when other writers were doing it wrong. The problem was that the Punisher - who is sensible, and shoots criminals in the head - was co-existing with allegedly more admirable heroes who beat criminals up, and then leave them alive to escape from gaol and kill again once another writer wants to use the same villain. By shifting him ever so slightly out of that context, Ennis could cut loose - without going too far the other way and turning it into a puerile celebration of violence for violence's sake. There's a very good scene in Warren Ellis' new issue of Astonishing X-Men in which Cyclops takes a similar clear-sighted line on how, in the superhero's line of work, sometimes killing is the only sensible thing to do. Contrast this with this week's editions of Secret Invasion and Captain Britain - they're both good comics, but in both heroes who normally make a big deal of the Heroic Code and how they Never Kill show no compunction whatsoever about killing invading Skrulls. So implicitly, even the life of an intractably evil human is sacrosanct, but those green alien mofos? Waste 'em. Leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, doesn't it?
Startlingly, DC also managed to put out a good comic this week - Grant Morrison's latest Batman RIP reassures me that, the evidence of Final Crisis aside, he hasn't been totally subsumed by Levitzseid's Anti-Fun Equation just yet.

'Silence in the Library' was a Moffat Who story, so obviously it was brilliant. Yes, in some ways he's repeating himself, but so what? They're good tropes. Give them another airing. ( Spoilers! )

When the last night of drinking on the Tube was announced as a possible Event by an associate, I was keen, not least because it intended a keynote of civility. Not even as a protest per se (I see the ban as a regrettable necessity - one of those blunt instrument laws like the age of consent which undoubtedly leads to injustices, but which remains a least worst option while we have neither the social nor technological maturity to enjoin and enforce what should be the one immutable law: Don't Be A Dick). But once other people had the same idea - people for whose character I could not vouch, and whose agendas were not quite the same - I paused. And once it was on the front of both freesheets, that was me out: carnage was inevitable and I didn't want to end up as part of the statistics proving the wrong point. So when I went into town in the afternoon, I had a tot of absinthe* from my hipflask on the bus in, another on the Piccadilly Line home, and said my own quiet farewell. With the bonus that I realised it was so discreet, it could probably still be managed post-ban.

For reasons I can't entirely explain, my usual practice is to build up a big list of potentially interesting acts to check out on Myspace, and then go through them en masse. Maybe it's like heats, to limit how many will get chance to win me over? So anyway, I had one of these runs and lots of them, as usual, were weak. The best thing was probably a rather epic, Iain Sinclair-style new Madness track, but by now you should all know whether or not you like Madness (though if you don't, you've maybe just not heard the right bits). That aside, the highlight was 'Stuck on Repeat' by Little Boots. Which I ought to find as generic as I do much modern electropop by hot girls (this one's ex-Dead Disco), yet somehow I don't. Maybe I'm giving her a pass for naming herself after Caligula? Maybe Hot Chip production helped? Maybe sometimes a song just stands out from its crowd.
(Best Myspace, though, was the new Swimmer One side project. The music did nothing for me, but I love the bio and the name: Sparklegash.

A Grant Morrison first issue is usually a big deal. The first Seven Sisters I read on a bus, spellbound, then went right back to the beginning and started all over again. The first All-Star Superman, I think that was three times. The first Final Crisis I read, shrugged, then read New Avengers 41 which is hardly the best Secret Invasion issue yet, but still made more impression on me. Then nipped in to the British Museum to reacquaint myself with the gods**, then came home reading the penultimate Dan Dare (real Single Manly Tear stuff) and the first issue of Millar's 1985, which is exactly the sort of supers-invade-our-poor-heroless-world stuff Morrison usually does so well. ( Those Final Crisis complaints in spoilerific detail ) It could yet improve. I really hope it does.
Grant's latest Batman issue, on the other hand, is brilliant.

France really doesn't make them like this anymore, does it? Why not?

*It was the only hipflask-suitable drink I had in the house. But beyond that, it seemed apt.
**I never formally decided, even to myself, that I wasn't going in while the terracotta army was there. I just somehow never found myself wanting to go in there during that period of time, and I don't really believe in coincidence.

The last Torchwood: well, I suppose it had its moments. ( Spoilers ) And then after, the trailer for today's new Who. Speeches about what the Doctor is get me every time. Or at least, they used to, but while at least Tate wasn't screeching these lines, nor could she make me believe them. I'm still going to watch it, obviously. But without any hope of enjoying the experience.

I'm currently halfway through two novels which have a brilliant handle on the quiet desperation of life in the first decade of the 21st century. One of them, Friction, is by Joe Stretch, the young frontman of the quite good band (we are) Performance; it came out last month. The other is 40 years old - John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar.
Friction is Michel Houllebecq if he were twice as good, and minus the po-faced self-importance of the Gallic intellectual cliche. The anomie, the corrosive effect of glossy magazines, the deadening social assumptions are all laid bare with a merciless scalpel. And nimble phrasing, too - in discussion of the modern fondness for comedy, he describes the era as 'pissless'. Which took me a moment, but...wow. Or consider: "Nowadays, opting out of social occasions is a form of self-mutilation." Best summation I've yet seen of the tension felt when one opts for a QNI. Or consider: "We have arrived at some poorly signposted junction in Earth's existence, when people can do little bar pay their rent and sit at tables, order drinks and chew Italian bread to mush. Who is remembering all this?"
Brunner, on the other hand, predicted the barely-suppressed hysteria of the big picture. Like anyone who gazes into the future, he's a little off in places; he's managed to get RSS aggregation and fake interactivity down, for instance, without realising the computer and the TV would merge. But if you had shown him the modern world, he'd have taken maybe a day to grasp it, and there's few enough people who live here of whom that can be said. In places, the problem is simply that his dystopia is too optimistic - he assumed that somewhere past the six billionth Earth human, even the core of the Catholic church would accept the need for birth control, nevermind the US government - but the overall tone, the resource shortage, the slow collapse; he saw it all coming. The gang problem causing so much woe in London? He foresees and explains it almost in passing, showing how it's the natural consequence of putting territorial mammals in an overcrowded environment. A prophet who should have been heeded sooner.

I would not yet make any claims for Marvel Comics' Secret Invasion event as Art, but as a big superhero comic about stuff blowing up, it got off to a very good start. ( Moderate spoilers )

Another good Clockwork Comedy on Tuesday; Carey Marx and Parsnip the teddy have such a wonderful way with the Wrong. I also liked the drunk Jewish girl* and the low-key storytelling guy (though I felt so sorry for him when he thought that so many people were laughing that it must all be a dream), but the video shop chap - not so much. You can't do geek humour and get the details wrong. If you were that into 300, you wouldn't keep calling it The 300. If you want to be Batman, you'll know that (regrettably) he doesn't kill. And above all, if you read Doctor Who Magazine you'll know it's not been Weekly in years.
Besides, what kind of film buff prefers video to DVD? DVD is the ultimate geek medium.

Today's random historical peculiarity: Strasbourg's 1518 'Dancing Plague': "Hundreds of men and women danced wildly, day after day, in the punishing summer heat. They did not want to dance, but could not stop". Many died. Puts the panic about Killer Rave Drug Ecstasy into perspective, doesn't it?

*Yes, I know, quelle surprise.