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

I see that Lewis' Japanese chums have taken a break and we're now being spammed with thoughts on Snape which, while equally out of context, do at least read like plausible comments and come from Livejournal accounts. They also come with payloads of Russian links on my Gmail notifications, but not on the posts themselves. Seems odd that the links can be filtered out but not the posts.

Largely a weekend of pop; on Saturday I was feeling sufficiently gigged out to skip Guided Missile, albeit with regret, and just hit Don't Stop Moving. A busy and bouncy night filled with booze, tunes and incident, and I even won some Spice Girls hankies, which I think makes up for losing my icecoldinalex birthday hadrosaur. And on Friday, the last Poptimism. Of late it had got into a vicious circle of irregularity and sparse attendance, so I was glad to see it make a good end, concluding with 'Ebenezer Goode' (and then one-more-ing with 'Being Boring', and then again with something I didn't know, and possibly more but I left because I never like sticking around for the very end of the end). Still, one gets the impression that the moment has been prepared for.

Speaking of which, also found time for a bit of a Who day. First up, The Two Doctors. Now, I've seen The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors many, many times and yes, they're fanservice and no, the plots don't make a great deal of sense, but I love them. Here, for all the appeal of putting Patrick Troughton and Colin Baker together, you get the sense that rather than simply accepting that the plot wasn't the main attraction, they lapsed into actual laziness. Hence we get bad nonsense rather than good nonsense, the kind that insults the intelligence instead of just letting it take a break. Also, the evil mastermind looks way too much like Karl Lagerfeld. Whereas The Curse of Peladon is put together well enough that it can easily survive not only a king who's the spit of Heaven 17's Glenn Gregory, but an alien ambassador who looks like a dick. Literally.
(I also saw Will Ferrell's Land of the Lost, based on an American kids' show about which I knew nothing, but which I inferred from this spoof to have been not that far from an American Doctor Who. Except it seems that the same creators made something even closer in The Lost Saucer, where two Earth youngsters are trapped with two aliens as their defective time-and-spaceship ricochets around history)

Why is half my friendspage posts about moving there? Have the Russian Overlords done something drastic, or is everyone just getting Gadarene on my ass in the spirit of these swinish times?

In other news: watched a bunch of Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes, and every story involved an animal as a crucial player in the crime. I'm now waiting for one in which the murderer is a quail with a blunderbuss.

The new Phonogram: I can see why everyone is getting Best Issue Ever about it, but feel less so, simply because while I can appreciate that it is an astonishingly well-constructed and resonant tale, Marc is essentially a fairly normal chap, and as such, not really like anyone I know. And a large part of why I love Phonogram is that the characters are the sort of people I might easily know.
(Really looking forward to the Mr Logos issue, though, if he gets one. He deserves one)
Gillen's contribution to this week's Dark Reign one-shot, on the other hand, is exactly the sort of thing I'm after, because the utter superciliousness of Namor...well, he's long been a role model of mine, clearly. Except for the (lack of) outfit. Peter Milligan's Loki effort and (surprisingly) Jonathan Hickman's Doom bit also very good, but I still don't really get why everyone loves Matt Fraction, and Rick Remender...well, his name sounds like 'remainder', which always put me off his comics, and this story gives me no reason to reconsider that.

Tomorrow, this journal will have been running for five years. Five years! Which is not to say I've been writing it for five years, of course. Still. Blimey.

Churchill: The Hollywood Years is even better than I expected. While I would say that I love the Comic Strip's earlier films on this theme, Strike and GLC, when I sit down to watch them I find myself uncomfortably reminded of their flaws. But here, perhaps because Peter Richardson had something closer to a Hollywood budget, he could manage a better facsimile of the Hollywood style - and if you're attempting parody then you should always attempt to be as close as possible to your target, all except for the one axis you alter. So, having Christian Slater instantly puts you ahead of having a Comic Strip regular playing a Hollywood star playing the lead, and so forth. The remarkable thing is that as well as mercilessly mocking Hollywood's take on British history (I especially liked the loveable Irish Cockneys of Ye Olde Dick Van Dyke Street), they also manage to skewer a few targets within the real Britain both today (the nightbus scene) and historically (if Neville Chamberlain wasn't quite Leslie Phillips carrying Hitler's bags for him, he wasn't far off). Oh, and I realise that outside this context the following would be de facto evidence of insanity, but: Princess Margaret? Superhott.
Compared to which, Black Snake Moan could hardly compete. Put it this way - if you think a film with a nymphomaniac Christina Ricci chained to a radiator in her underwear sounds awesome, you'll be disappointed. If you think it sounds atrocious, you'll be pleasantly surprised. If the whole thing had been sold more as a film about the blues with a surprisingly effective supporting turn from Justin Timberlake, maybe everyone would have had a better idea what to expect.

In one of those handy developments where my interests intersect, the new Mountain Goats album has a song about HP Lovecraft.

Listening to the sixth series of Andy Hamilton's Hell-com Old Harry's Game, I found it entertaining enough but didn't quite get why some people esteem it so highly. They seem to have been casting around for new set-ups by that series, is that the problem? I mean, yes it works as a light topical and theological satire, but I'm not sure it's something that would reward repeat listening any more than HIGNFY? is rewatchable. And if it's not the case that everyone goes to Hell, why was Gandhi there? I just assumed from mentions like his that nobody makes Hamilton's Heaven, but apparently that's not it. So at least get a gag out of consigning someone like Gandhi to the flames!

Meanwhile, all the real world can offer is a new gay plague in San Francisco, why we were right to be scared of In The Night Garden and some fairly atrocious weather. I think I'm staying in hiding 'til February.

"If we want our kids and our friends' kids to have somewhere to live that's of a decent standard" then the answer has nothing to do with building more houses, on the green belt or otherwhere. It has to do with curbing the buy-to-let explosion. Apart from anything else, unless there's a change in the law and the tax breaks then all those new homes are just going to be bought up by investors like the extant ones are. So all you'll accomplish is destroying what little open space remains on this overbuilt island and making the rich richer. And meanwhile, a senior cop wants to ban having a drink in the park of a summer afternoon as a strike against teen disorder - having apparently failed to notice that there already exist laws against the disorderly acts themselves. So, given a certain element of society is breaking the current laws with no fear of the consequences, they'll do likewise with this one - while the people who aren't currently causing anyone a problem, in part because of an ingrained reluctance to break the law, will be denied yet another of life's simple pleasures. I mean, seriously, how can anyone fail to spot these jaw-crumblingly obvious correspondences? Are they all really that stupid?
...And this is why I've not been updating a great deal lately. When I'm reasonably content, I see no particular angle from which I could write much more than "I watched Bad Boys. Stuff blew up. It was fun" or "I went to the park and drank some pink wine. This made me happy". And when I'm not in a good mood...well, OK, sometimes it's in-between. Sometimes I have vague musings on a topic of possible interest. But then I check myself and ask, am I actually about to say anything new, or would it just be posting for the sake of posting? Sure, pretty much any half-formed thought which manages to survive its first five seconds in my brain will be of more intellectual merit than, oooh, 95% of the stuff posted to the Guardian blogs, but that is not in itself a sufficient qualification for existence. But beyond the musings comes the rage, and the internet is not exactly short of splenetic rants either, is it? If I were being paid to do a weekly column on What Really Grinds My Gears, sorted. Hell, I wouldn't find a daily one too taxing either. Or even hourly so long as I could file in advance...but I'm not. I'm on my own time. And the sheer amount of stuff that pisses me off is beginning to alarm me. I mean, yes, I know I've said in the past that I'm hoping to muster enough pure hate that I can channel it as beams of destructive energy, but when you think about it, running omega beams off an internal power source never did Darkseid much good, did it? And that line in BBC4's Cantor documentary where the shrink noted that schizophrenic breakdown was often preceded by "looking too hard at the world...a rigidity of perceptual stance" felt far too close to home. So I've once more become a little captivated by that Franz Ferdinand line from 'Matinee', where he's on about all the things he hates and "you smile, mention something that you'd like, how you'd have a happy life if you did the things you like". Lately there was this spider on the outside of my kitchen window and I thought, he's still, maybe if I just look at the web instead of the spider? It's a lovely pattern, a startling feat of construction, almost mandala-like. And it worked, for a little while. But then last night, I come in and he's moving - the way they move being what gets me with spiders, it's like the sound of metal on metal, goes right through me. But I try to calm it down, manage. Then back in again later - and now he's eating, giving me the full Shelob revulsion/terror/killer instinct reaction, and there are limits, and I have a decent sized book in my hand. If I am to be redeemed, it will not be by that road.

Against which...well, the My Life Story B-sides and rarities album finally arrived. As with Suede's Sci-Fi Lullabies, it is marred by being incomplete, and incomplete in odd ways - it includes plenty of the later ones nobody was much bothered about, utterly superfluous demos, and far too many takes on bloody 'Emerald Green', while omitting (among others) the marvellous 'Sir Richard Steele'. And even the good tracks...they never quite captured their magic on tape, did My Life Story. The CDs were always reminders of the live show, because live they were magic. Literally, and yes I do know what that word means - I saw them transform Derby's dingy square into a plaza on Roxyworld.
See? Even when I'm trying to be happy, it goes this way. For the moment, at least - over and out.

The saga of my doppelgangers continues - now we have one who's definitely not the one someone thought I was in conversation (because he's deeply Glaswegian) or the one who was chased after in the belief he was me (because he would have responded, because he's also called Alex).

To my total unsurprise, the trailers were right and the critics were wrong; Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is all kinds of awesome. ( Spoilers, obviously )
The pilot for the first His Dark Materials film beforehand looked extremely promising too, bear CGI excepted.

Some thoughts of alexdecampi's crystallised vague musings of my own - namely, that the explosion of Facebook seems to have left Myspace slightly tumbleweedy. A month or two ago, I was getting a minimum of ten Myspace bulletins a day (at least half from 586, but still). Now...two or three most days, sometimes only one. Is this just novelty value, or a long-term shift?

Comics recommendation: Gutsville, by Simon Spurrier and Frazer Irving. 2000AD fans will recognise that as the Simping Detective team, but elsewhere Irving is probably best known for Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers: Klarion. Which may mean he's at risk of getting typecast as the go-to artist for sunless netherworlds in which lost Puritan colonies battle human weakness as well as unnatural threats, but hey, he does do them very well. This time the setting is the interior of a giant sea-beast which swallowed their ship. The tagline: SEDITIONISTS WILL BE DIGESTED.
(And outlandish though the setting of Gutsville may be, I can intuitively understand what is going on, why the creators created it, and why people are expected to wish to read it. None of this can be said for issue three of New Avengers: Illuminati, quite the most bafflingly bad comic I have read since...ooh, Rann/Thanagar War?)

""I've fallen a little bit out of love writing songs in recent times... the interest for my own songs becomes less and less as years go on. I've written so many songs, and you find yourself re-treading the same ground," explains [Marc Almond]." One could be cruel and wish that this had occurred to Marc Almond a couple of albums sooner, but there are plenty of performers who've been in the business longer and still not come to this level of self-knowledge.

For all that their last album was a bit of a debacle, I can't help but be excited by the news that the new Divine Comedy album has the working title 11 Modern Antiquities and some songs have been co-written with XTC's Andy Partridge.

Wole Soyinka "says that all "hidden atrocities" are revealed eventually, even if many years later. "It all comes to light in the end. So why don't these would-be Stalins and Hitlers take a leaf from history instead of burdening us with exposing their crimes? Why does it have to happen again and again?"" Well, Wole, maybe it's because they see that for the most part, it works. Yes, we all remember Hitler dying in the bunker as the tanks advanced, but he was arguably the anomaly. Stalin died in bed aged 74, and Mao 82, after full and contented lives of genocide and brutality. Even the dictators who are deposed as often as not end up in genteel exile rather than Death Row. You may have been "chief judge at a mock trial last November when Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir was found guilty in absentia of crimes against humanity in Darfur" - but he's still running the show, and with the West's interventionist will broken since Iraq, he's likely to continue running the show. Just like Mugabe, just like the junta in Burma, just like whichever faceless old bastard's running China these days. The triumph of virtue and the monsters vanquished is a plot one sees often - in fiction.

New Labour's Oofy Wegg-Prosser is apparently now working for a company which "has the Cyrillic rights to LiveJournal.com, the networking and blog site which has exploded in the country. Its content is, according to Wegg-Prosser, far more "sophisticated" than its English-language equivalent, with intellectuals, poets and novelists posting blogs." Interesting. For obvious reasons I haven't read many Cyrillic LJs, but one of the few I did see (clicking on people who shared one of my rarer interests) led with a picture of someone proudly showing off the vodka bottle rammed up their backside.

Saw some Twang matches earlier; if only I'd expected to see the Twang around the place, while having some accelerant to hand, I would have grabbed them for reasons of poetic justice. Hell, even NME is tiring of them already - they generally reserve 6/10 for the *second* album by bands they hyped ahead of the debut. I could almost feel sorry for the poor imbeciles, seeing their shot at the big time crumbling already - except of course that they're worthless oafs upon whom I wish every possible sorrow and degradation.

"You don't have to insult people to be frank," says Wikipedia's co-founder. Yes you do, you prick. If you're being frank about people who are one or more of arses, liars, racists or general dicks, then the use of all these insults and more is clearly necessary. What next, blogs to be regulated under the principle of 'If you can't say anything nice then don't say anything at all', or the old lie about swearing being a sign of an impoverished vocabulary? The Draft Blogger's Code of Conduct is at best a prissy irrelevance, and at worst a sign of creeping (self-)censorship. I hope I'm not the only person who would find myself losing a great deal of respect for any site sappy enough to sign up to it.

John Lanchester argues wisely and persuasively that intellectual property rights, which began as a safeguard for creators, have instead become a feeding trough for corporations. I just wish I shared his optimism about the chances of changing that.

"I knew something about ISNA and asked Syeed why—if his group truly supported peace and suchlike—its board included members directly linked to Islamic extremism and anti-Semitism, including the notorious Wahhabi-trained Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj. The professorial Syeed dropped his polite mask, shook his fist at me, told me that I would one day "repent," and compared my question with a Nazi inquisition." An informative/terrifying piece on the methods Islamists use in attempting to skew debate and demonise anyone who stands up to them, and how it's all done "with the declared aim of improving relations".