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

Had a couple of weddings last month, out of London to varying degrees - one in a home counties barn, the other in Compton Verney, which is not the most accessible location but does mean you can have a reception surrounded by Cranachs, Holbeins and a coral nativity diorama which some enterprising Neapolitan crafted centuries back, and climb atop a bloody big rock if you need a break from the band. I'd decided to go straight from there to Devon the next day, simply because going back into and then out of London again appalled my sense of progress. This might have been a false time-economy, but the resulting vaguely diagonal journey did take me in a reasonably straight line across large swathes of the country I don't often see - a real 'How fares England? sort of journey. And despite what one might fear, every train involved was punctual bar one which was deeply apologetic over being a minute behind schedule. Inevitably, by the time I got to the seaside the warm spell had passed, so it was all sea mist and chopping up telegraph poles and being disappointed when local country acts didn't emphasise the side of their oeuvre which most appealed to me (the unspeakable bastards).

Other exotic locales I've visited include Walthamstow Village, where I attempted to convince people even less conversant with the area than myself that model butterflies were simply the giant fauna of Zone 3, and Peckham Rye, which seems to have a higher concentration of brilliant dogs than anywhere else in London (also a boy trapped in a tent, which is always good entertainment). And, as the year has made its stuttering advance into Spring, the Edinburgh previews have begun: I've already seen Thom Tuck (excellent as ever, even in the very early stages), Nish Kumar, Sara Pascoe and, as a late sub for Ben Target, Matthew Highton - who looks like Frank Quitely drew him and tells stories (perhaps not wholly true) of a life Peter Milligan could easily have conceived.

Not a great deal of clubbing lately - though Poptimism did offer a chance to dance to 'Only Losers Take The Bus', so what more does one need? - and my pub quizzing, if successful, has been sparse. But there have, as ever, been gigs. The Bull and Gate is no more, because apparently Kentish Town needs another damn gastropub, so Keith TotP et al played a send-off - the first time in a while that I've seen the Minor UK Indie Celebrity All-Star Backing Band on a stage large enough to contain them. In support, Dom Green's latest band, with a very apt set formed by pulling together songs from all the bands he'd been in before that had played there - and yet ending with a new one which may be the best thing he's ever written (but then, I was always a sucker for epics about London). Rebekah Delgado, supporting a bunch of steampunk tits at a rock pub, then off to Shenanigans. The Indelicates, still the best band of the moment, ever more romantic and ever more doomed. But I think my favourite overall event was the Soft Close-Ups show which was the only reason augstone was allowed back over to visit us. They've always been a fairly melancholy band, but with the immigration-based reminder of how fleeting things can be, and a Housman poem set to music, this outing was especially mis. And yet, gorgeous. icecoldinalex supported and, for a note of bathos, the venue was decorated in vintage soft p0rn. The sort of inexplicable afternoon which comes along too seldom.

The current series of Who has for the most part continued on its profoundly underwhelming course, with a revival of hopes occasioned by 'Hide', 'Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS' and Gatiss' campathon undermined by last night's inexplicably middling Gaiman effort, but between Bluestone 42, It's Kevin and Parks and Rec's second season, there has at least been plenty of good comedy on the box, and these are surely times in which we need cheering up, so thank heavens for that. I've barely seen any films of late: Iron Man 3 at the cinema, which was a joy; Skyfall and Terror by Night on DVD, which were a little less so. I just can't quite buy Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, he's far too socially adroit - even clubbable.

When this goes up, I'll still have more than a year's worth of posts on one page, where once a page would have not been sufficient for some months. And yet, we persevere, in some limping fashion.

One can't say he was taken too soon or anything, but it's still a shame about John Barry. I watched a film he scored this weekend, Boom. Tennessee Williams' favourite film adaptation of his own work, and directed by the great Joseph Losey, it is nonetheless a dispiriting, messy slog. Elizabeth Taylor, after so long as the epitome of female desirability, has here become the sad, pilled-up drag queen's pastiche of herself that we know today - a much-married woman still convinced of her own desirability, hemmed in by injections and paranoia, the fleshiness of that face already running to fat. Noel Coward queens around in a role that contributes little beyond exposition and some baffling innuendo. Richard Burton has a certain battered dignity, looking surprisingly plausible in a kimono, but he can't do more to save the film than help with the couple of scenes near the end where Taylor remembers she can act.

I'm reading a Bogart biography at the moment, so it's appropriate that this weekend was mainly spent at gigs watching the usual suspects. Bevan 17 in Brixton first, and then much of the PopArt weekender, with Brontosaurus Chorus (if 'Louisiana' really was their last song ever, it's a shame Johnny and I didn't barrel on stage and start in with the chainsaw); Subliminal Girls (I spent almost the entire set at the bar, the service at the Bloomsbury Bowl was so bad); Keith TotP et al (vocals inaudible, but hey, lots of guitars); MJ Hibbett (I was obliged to contribute a sort of civilised heckle over his buying into Fantastic Four death hype, but the song in question mentions 'sulking like Black Bolt' so I can forgive much); The Laurel Collective (since I last heard them, Mystery Jets have happened, so now the poor sods sound like they're ripping off Mystery Jets even though they were doing this first); Abdjouparov (Les Carter was a young Bowie fan, and alas, he is now in his own Tin Machine phase); Mr Solo (minty Polo); and the PopArt Allstars (complete with Mr Solo mixing 'Space Oddity' and 'The Laughing Gnome' into the 'Modern Love' outro, Hibbett's 'Live and Let Die' accompanied by terrifyingly exothermic party poppers, and a 'Brimful of Asha' which I genuinely thought might never end).
Perhaps more importantly, I also confirmed that I have not lost my table football skills. Excellent.

I've finally read David Mazzuchelli's much-praised graphic novel (and for once, the term does apply, instead of just being an embarrassed synonym for 'comic') Asterios Polyp and yes, it is excellent. Remember a few years back when the mainstream critics were getting over-excited about the miserable piece of crap that was Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth? Because being, quite often, middle-aged men who feel they have wasted their lives, a lot of critics like works addressing similar themes (a good example in cinema: Sideways). Asterios Polyp, like Jimmy Corrigan, is a miserable middle-aged man, but instead of taking it to the absurd and risible lengths of Ware's effort, Mazzuchelli's protagonist is a success, of sorts...just one who still doesn't feel like he's succeeded, because how many people do? And beyond being more believable, it has vastly more to say. The one thing I did like in Jimmy Corrigan was the architecture...well, Polyp is an architect, and that gives us the way in to what Mazzuchelli is getting at here, expressed in a staggeringly versatile art which gives key characters their own art styles and then lets those spheres of influence ebb and flow into each other as a way of investigating how our own subjective worlds sometimes, somehow do manage to connect.
I don't want to get carried away here - obviously it's no All-Star Superman - but for people who really can't stand reading anything involving superheroes or robots or magic or teenage antics (ie, anything genre; ie, anything fun) then this may be the best comic in the world.

Eight days since I updated? It's not as if I haven't been doing stuff, much of it fun; I'm just not sure a lot of it would make for an account anyone else wants to read. Consider diggerdydum drinks, for instance, where without the pseudo-fez pictures I'd just be left with a series of recursive in-jokes of which "something for the Richard Dadds" is probably the only one that bears repeating. And the only issue of the day to exercise me centres around the arrival of .xxx, a domain expressly designated for filth. Now, any smart company has all their suffixes registered, don't they? .com may be your brand, but you buy up .net as well, and .co.uk, and so forth. But how about this? Who will register tesco.xxx? disney.xxx? earlylearningcentre.xxx?

So, what is there to report? An old colleague's book launch on Friday (strange how any home movie of a certain vintage now acts as an instant signifier for nostalgia, almost regardless of content), then on to the final Cross Kings AFE. A venue I'd hated beforehand, but have come to forgive even its appalling murals simply by association with this night. It's only fitting for a Stay Beautiful-inspired event to be forced into something of the same wander around London, I suppose, but I hope it can take its atmosphere with it better than SB sometimes managed.
Went for pizza on Saturday. In the great Finsbury Park pizza war, I have always sided with Porchetta, simply because they do quattro formaggi better, but they've just had an ill-advised refurb and installed a load of blaring, glaring plasma screens, so we figured Pappagone was worth another try. And we got outside tables, and the pizzas were yummy (I went fiorentina instead), and everything was fine...and then they rolled down their own big screen. Quiet, at least, but being outside put us behind and to one side of it, and trying to signal to the staff inside felt like being in a ghost story where you're trapped in a mirror. Took 15 minutes to get the bill. Fvcking footballism.
Sunday was a Brontosaurus Chorus show, with some of them supporting themselves as Dinosaur Senior, the dino-masked and -themed covers band. Both fine sets, ditto the astonishing-looking Pussycat & the Dirty Johnsons, who thought I looked bored but how can one be when there's a girl with her hair done up like ears stomping around tables in a catsuit, screaming? I just have a jaded face. All this in the Bloomsbury Bowl, but not the one I knew - turns out there's another bar, the Kingpin Suite, which is nearly as bling as the name suggests; they have Baywatch pinball and even the ventilation ducts are mirrored.

Saturday night: a double bill of bands whose videos I've been in, so I was expecting to get mobbed by Youtube enthusiasts but people just seemed to watch the bands instead. I suppose they are both ace, so fair enough. If further proof were needed, I heard Loyd Grossman tell Brontosaurus Chorus "that was really good" in his actual Loyd Grossman voice. Didn't stick around for his band, though. Watching Loyd Grossman's pub rock band is a bit like shagging the Queen - worth it for the pub anecdote if you've got nothing else on, but if there's another offer you'd enjoy, it's just perverse. Of course, that did also mean missing Mr Solo but hey, it's only a fortnight since I saw him. The Queen-shagging analogy doesn't extend to that bit, I don't think. But off to Don't Stop Moving for pop we went. Whenever I go to two things with music in one night, however varied the remits, there will always be at least one song played at both, and this time it was 'Uptown Top Ranking'. Not the Black Box Recorder version, alas. In between playing 'Identify What The Own-Brand Confectionery Is Imitating' (and usually very well, both as in I guessed them all and they were all indistinguishable in taste from their more famous prototypes) I danced rather a lot, including twice to Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance'. I think that, helped by the Camden Head's pleasingly overpowered soundsystem, I may be on the verge of being worn down/won over.

On Friday I wasn't going to go out because of the storm, but then it hit me - that's precisely the reason to go out, because hearing the great wind batter against the windows is fun but seeing the leaves lashed by air and water, the hurrying shadows from the Fullback's smoking pagoda is so much better. The best moment came when one gust caught a pub table umbrella, sending it pirouetting high into the air - and then plummeting clumsily down the central well, like the suicide of a ballerina attempting one final gesture against gravity. Except obviously I didn't say that at the time, going instead with 'oh my god' followed by 'sack the juggler'.

Thursday was the release party for the new issue of Phonogram, except it's not out yet because of some printing cock-up, but I did end up with an issue anyway. Don't bother trying to follow that. The point is, I think this is my favourite issue of The Singles Club. I said earlier on in the series, and azureskies notes from the other end here, that with this prismatic run of individual experiences of a night, it's not so much about the craft of the comic, because that runs at a consistently high standard; it's about which issues are your experiences, your people, your bands. And of all the music so far (yes, even 'Atomic') my favourite is the Long Blondes. This issue reminds me why, while also reminding me why I took them off my MP3 player - "My life is neither as good or bad as a Long Blondes song, but I have the sense and understanding that perhaps...well, perhaps one day it may be". More so even than the work of Greg Dulli, they are music to do bad things to. And yet after this issue, the first album is back on the MP3 player.
(Also out this week from Gillen and (partially) McKelvie, S.W.O.R.D. which Gillen correctly describes as His Girl Friday in space. Top fun, but I think I may enjoy it even more once the obligatory Dark Reign tie-in is out of the way because for all that it was a timely and smart direction for the Marvel Universe, I am starting to get a leetle tired of it)

The House Beautiful is having the Bathroom Slightly Grotty renovated, which while it's not before time, is mildly inconvenient in the meantime, especially what with me not needing to be at a job during the day or anything because of the whole 'epochal depression' business. Meaning that by the time I'd normally be surfacing in the morning, today I had already showered, dressed and watched Hard Candy. I remember this being much praised at the time - a hard-hitting but thoughtful and taut drama about paedophilia. Mainly, though, I just found myself thinking that now To Catch A Predator does the entrapment bit for real, TV doesn't exactly need this, and that as a two-hander which mostly takes place in one house, it would work much better as a play.
Also, I totally failed to register that the male lead was the guy who played Nite Owl.

I thought my policy of always giving a new HBO show a chance might have hit its limits with Hung. Especially since it's on More4 on Thursday nights, at an end of the week already overloaded with Sarah Jane Adventures, Wednesday night's HBO double-bill, Friday's comedy options...but much to my surprise, the first episode at least was excellent. The trailers have been going about it all wrong, emphasising the comedy/prurient angle we've all seen before. Whereas the show itself...in much the same way as The Wire used police and drug gangs as a way to examine the decline of the American city, or Deadwood looked at the birth of the nation by way of a psychopathic publican, Hung examines the squeezing of the middle class through the example of a hard-up history teacher with a really big cock. It's more about the way everything seems to be falling apart, and the sense that our working life is not working out like we were given to expect, than Thomas Jane's endowment.

Wednesday night: augstone brings billetdoux along on a mini-US deputation to the Noble, establishing that even if Obama has more sense than to be seen with Gordon Brown, the special relationship is alive and well at the level of indie pubbing. Thursday: a Brontosaurus Chorus show, the first I've seen since icecoldinalex joined and the first time I've really heard the song for which I spent two days filming - Johnny and I have to resist the urge to re-enact the video on stage. The gig's in a weird little basement venue on Denmark Street called Peter Parker's; there's no Spider-Man iconography that I can see, but the cocktail 'Peter Parker's Cvm Shot' still makes me think 'thwip!'. The support are a noise duo whose name is never announced (my own guess: Sine Cosine Tangent); they're playing in front of a projection of Akira, the subtitles on which provide a perfect excuse to stare at the girl's fairly impressive cleavage. All told, I probably had enough material for a post on Friday, but I had to dash off to catch Seizure (ignore all the pretentious guff in the leaflet, the key details of this art project are that it is very blue and very shiny and quite magical). However, this is probably for the best as it means I can gently draw a veil over the weekend.

I keep hearing good things about the comics of Matt Fraction, so I keep picking them up when the library has them, and I'm still not convinced that he's anything but Warren Ellis's even more try-hard younger brother. All his characters sound the same: "Let's make out and whip up more plans for mass slaughter", cackles the villain. Whereas Iron Man himself gloats "Your tax dollars pay me to beat the Hell out of people like this. (I decline the paycheck, by the way)". Which is identical in tone, and also completely meaningless - he just came up with a line he liked and deployed it even though it required a caveat that then made no sense. The only way I could persevere was by pairing it with the disappointing Micro Men on BBC4, there being a strange congruence of themes. "My biggest nightmare has come true...Iron Man 2.0 is here...and I'm not the one that made it" - the cheap, easy to use and ultimately disposable new technology as plot driver, all made me start identifying Clive Sinclair as a British comedy version of Tony Stark. I don't know what that says about anything but it says more than Fraction's Iron Man.
(Also read something where he at least tried to ditch the tech fetish and the KEWL! - Secret Invasion: Thor. And that was just horribly characterless, in spite of featuring Beta Ray Bill, so maybe the usual mode is the lesser evil for him. The failure of this one was thrown into particular relief by how funny and characterful and cosmic and generally *fun* Secret Invasion: Hercules could make a story starting from a fairly similar premise)

*Although having made derogatory mention of Ellis, it's only fair I acknowledge that the final issue of Planetary was beautiful - the first comic since the end of Captain Britain to leave me both crying and laughing in public. Even if that doesn't explain why it was so ridiculously late. Or why newuniversal is. Or Doktor Sleepless.

David Devant have new material! And Brontosaurus Chorus do too, but that doesn't come as quite such a surprise, them not having been however many years now without any. Still, let joy be unconfined! Anyway, it's that time of year, isn't it? The NME have printed their predictably predictable list, so I might as well tell you what were really the ( Albums of the Year, 2008 )

As for singles - or I suppose we should just say 'tracks' nowadays...it wasn't a bad year, but there was no Song Of The Year, was there? By which I mean something both brilliant and ubiquitous, an 'Umbrella' or 'Get Ur Freak On' or 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head'. 'Wearing My Rolex' felt like it could be that song, but it was too early and didn't hang around like it ought to have done, ditto 'Ready For The Floor' (in spite of that brilliant proto-Dark Knight video) and Hercules & Love Affair's 'Blind'. MGMT's 'Time To Pretend' and Black Kids' 'I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You'...too hipster to win over the world, perhaps? Both wonderful, though. I think the song which'll probably take me right back to 2008 in years to come is 'I.W.I.S.H.I.W.A.S.Gay'; alas, if it does conquer the rest of the world, it's not going to be 'til next year now.

Best book title I've seen recently: Building Confidence - For Dummies.

I wasn't so much surprised to find myself in a Hoxton jazz bar after the restaurant threw us out on Friday, as I was surprised that Howard Moon wasn't there. Later, having perhaps inadvisably carried on drinking even after the jazz bar, I found myself making my way home through a night so bitterly cold that I genuinely felt I had to check I was still wearing my clothes. I was.
Rather than resting after this trying experience with a flannel soothing my brow, I instead headed down to Dulwich with augstone to see martylog play through heavy distortion in a working men's club. You know at gigs, that area (usually a semicircle) in front of the stage where none of the audience want to stand too far forward? Here there was a legitimate reason: it was full of children hitting each other with the wreckage of a colouring-in book. Martin was followed by Simon Breed; I know six Simon Breed songs, and one of the things I remember about them is the creative use of obscenity. Bit of a problem when you're playing to toddlers, so I can only applaud his talent for adaptation, though I was somewhat distracted from his set by being used as cover in a child skirmish. Resolving to steal some of the kids' dance moves for Black Plastic, we departed, pausing only for dinner and an unnecessarily long Julian Cope song.
Black Plastic remains a delightful hybrid of Stay Beautiful back when it was packed with people I knew, and Love Your Enemies if the control panel had featured anything but self-destruct buttons. It reminds me why I like going out, especially when I see people dancing to something that's quite emphatically Their Song - be that kitty_collar to 'Dance Magic Dance', or chris_damage to 'Der Mussolini', or the Pink Grease boys gradually giving up the attempt to stay cool and getting down to 'The Pink G.R.Ease'.
On Sunday I should really, definitely have stopped drinking. But I had another birthday, and this one was in a pub with especially yummy cider (Thatcher Gold? Something like that). And then, well, The Black Arts ft. Mister Solo weren't playing where we thought they were, but Dirty Fingernails and Brontosaurus Chorus were, so it would be rude not to really, wouldn't it?
Tonight, therefore, I rest.

While I have been basically in favour of daylight saving time ever since reading this, I do tend to think that doing it in any increment smaller than an hour is a bit fvckwitted. The other note from the outside world: 40% of people consider social harmony more important than press freedom. Better that everyone muddle along together in the dark than doubt their leaders or neighbours, right? Anything for a quiet life! Dear heavens but the human race depresses me sometime. Did I say sometime? I meant most of the time.

Since last updating I've seen the four Gallilean moons of Jupiter and the full band version of Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring* for the first time, pleasant reminders that there are still fresh joys to be had from life. And walking home from the Brontosaurus Chorus show, sober in the autumn night - well, it felt like an altered state. And the Luxembourg evening had its share of incident too, from being taken for an undercover cop escorting an underage fag-buyer, through the first band's apology that their singer was still on the Tube, to what was far too storming a 'Luxembourg vs Great Britain' for me to suspect it was thedavidx's first public play of it.

Went to see Shoot 'Em Up simply because it had Clive Owen with a gun, Monica Bellucci with breasts, and that prick from Sideways getting plugged, but aware that similar thinking has in the past led to my seeing dreck like Underworld. This time, though, I was not disappointed. Shoot 'Em Up is the action movie distilled. There's just enough plot and character to stop the entire thing collapsing, but no more. It's even fairly purist in its action - there's a little stabbing, but no explosions. The title tells you there will be shooting, and shooting there is. Glorious, grotesque amounts of it. It's so spare in everything else that it could almost count as arthouse, if only it weren't far too fun.

Contrary to earlier worries, Gerard Way's comic Umbrella Academy is available in Britain after all, which is handy because it's rather good. Also, far less emo than one might expect; it has the melancholic humour of Lemony Snicket or Edward Gorey, rather than outright angst. The art helps; Gabriel Ba brings the same deranged inventiveness he had on Fraction's Casanova, without this time being hampered by a slightly try-hard script.

Finally checked out one of the Royal George's promising new indie discos; good music, good crowd, but no dancefloor. And I'm sure it would only take a minor rearrangement of the furniture to make one, and capitalise on what could be a good little venue.

*Their 'Saint Cecilia' in particular sounds like Bid joining Kenickie.