alexsarll: (bill)
2009-06-18 01:32 pm

I feel like I've died and gone to indie

If you like Seth Rogen films, Will Ferrell films, basically any of the good comedies that have been coming out of America lately, you must see The Hangover. Went into it somewhat uncertain - against all those interlocking sets of funny guys, I didn't really recognise anyone in this except the dad from Arrested Development. But it is hilarious. There's little I can say without spoiling it, and you probably know whether you'll like it from the set-up; four guys go for a stag night in Vegas. They wake the next morning to find the room trashed, a tiger in the bathroom, and the groom missing. They have no idea what happened in between.

Raced through the last season of Battlestar Galactica this week and can't help but feel disappointed. she was a grand old lady - spoilers below and likely in comments )

Finally succeeded in seeing the Wellcome Collection yesterday. I had expected something more thoroughly medical in theme, but between the sex toys and torture implements and pictures of Wellcome himself in fancy dress with the 'tache to end all 'taches, I conclude that it's not that far from Sir John Soane's, just with a little more pretence towards being something other than one rich bloke's collection of crazy stuff.
alexsarll: (pangolin)
2009-03-26 11:17 am

almost blatantly immemorial

I suppose with Google Streetview available my urban explorations have become even more inexplicable and archaic - but since when was that a bad thing? On Tuesday I took the W3 to the end of the line - the end I don't live at, clearly. All these years of seeing them headed to Northumberland Park, and now I've seen it. There isn't much to see; once you get past Wood Green and into darkest Haringey, through White Hart Lane and Tottenham High Road, it's only the odd name which gives you any clue you're in London - normally you can at least tell that you're in a crappy bit of London, but here you could be on the more depressing fringes of Derby, or even (gods help us) Leicester. I did manage to thread my way through an industrial estate to Tottenham Marshes, but even that...it has herons to disturb, and a canal boat population which seems to be halfway to becoming a pirate kingdom, but I have encountered no London open space so thoroughly littered. And once you start heading up towards Walthamstow (its border with Tottenham coming across as though it could easily be sealed in time of war), there's a uniquely disturbing nature reserve where it's difficult to tell how whoever's set up a makeshift shack in the middle of the thicket establishes boundaries with the cottagers of whom the ground provides copious evidence. I suppose wildlife often does best in environments least welcoming to humans, and this is hardly Chernobyl.

I'm sufficiently behind with Battlestar Galactica that, in the week where most people are still OMG-ing over the finale, I've just watched Razor. Which doesn't suck like some of the one-off episodes do, but has the common problem of retcons - why was this never mentioned before? Partly dodged by the focus on a new character, but again - why should I invest in this character when the mere fact of us being in a flashback is a pretty good clue that she's not going to make it? Also, as has been pointed out elsewhere, that is not a razor, you twits.
I really should get Season 4 pretty pronto.

Today: the zoo, and 18 Carat Love Affair at 93 Feet East (which works quite well, doesn't it, both starting with numbers like that).
alexsarll: (crest)
2009-02-24 02:37 pm

I missed you most of all, Gmail

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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.
alexsarll: (death bears)
2009-01-21 03:34 pm

This is the dawning of a new era - so maybe I should get out of bed

The new Morrissey album, based on two listens, is deeply patchy, and the new Anthony & the Johnsons is basically the same as the last one, but slightly less so. More to my surprise, given I liked You Could Have It So Much Better, first impressions of the new Franz Ferdinand are that for the most part, it's a bloody mess. [livejournal.com profile] icecoldinalex, this means that thus far you're still Album of the Year.

I know BSG's Number Six Cylon was named in honour of The Prisoner, but I'd never thought the parallels went much beyond that. I'm reconsidering in light of Season Three, where as with my Prisoner DVD, all the faintly pointless episodes seem to be contained on Disc Four. Homage!
Anyway, I have now finished the third season. Frakking Hell.

Finished The Worm Ouroboros and...well, I'm not cutting this, it was written near 90 years ago, but if you're planning to read it for the plot then look away now. I know the title should have given this away, but in some senses I have never read a more pointless book. Our heroes break the power of Witchland utterly - and then sit around moping, worrying that life will never again offer them anything so awesome as that war. This a war in which, aside from the danger to themselves and the deaths of their men, their land was despoiled and one of their sisters damn near raped. This in a book written by an Englishman mere years after the War To End All Wars might even seem, at terrible cost, to have succeeded. So by calling in a boon from the gods - they resurrect Witchland and take us right back to the start! I've seen the idea of Valhallan eternal war crop up a few times for examination in art - Grant Morrison was intrigued by it in early days, from his climactic Zoids to the Warner Bros deconstruction of 'The Coyote Gospel'. But I'm hard pressed to think of anything else written since the Middle Ages which quite so unambiguously celebrates that idea, particularly when the conflict encompasses innocents as well as the protagonists.
As a palate cleanser, have now moved on to the charming eccentricity of Dry Store Room No. 1. This has already been extensively blogged of late by my friendslist, so I shall restrain myself to mentioning how glad I am that I started this *after* my recent return visit to the Natural History Museum, such that when Richard Fortey says:
"There are still galleries in the Natural History Museum displaying minerals, the objects themselves - a kind of museum of a museum, preserved in aspic from the days of such systematic rather than thematic exhibits. Few people now find their way to these galleries."
- and think, after the Great Hall, that was the first place I went! And I got to surreptitiously touch a thing from another world, some witch-iron! It wouldn't be nearly so much fun if that had happened the other way round; I'd feel like I was being worthy, being watched, rather than naturally doing the right thing.
alexsarll: (bernard)
2009-01-18 01:10 pm

Ouch

Tony Hart too? That's far too many pillars of the national identity toppled in one week. Enough now, please, Mr Reaper, before Ray Davies or Stephen Fry is next.

All the walking for which I now have time and inclination has coincided, unfortunately, with some new boots which are still being worn in, and after Wednesday's excursions, I ended up with rather sore feet. No matter; all it changed on Thursday was that I Tubed from South Ken to Victoria, and since this gave me more reading time later, no harm done. Dead Letter Office is not really a dancey evening, though it's a thing of wonder to hear Subcircus' '86'd' in public in 2008; even during what passed for their heyday it was hardly a club hit. Similarly with The Vapour Trail; I was mainly there for the bands and left before the dancing got started, though it was great to hear non-obvious Cure tracks and 'Lagartija Nick', and the latter would surely have had me on the floor later. So after all this, I'm on the road to recovery and wondering where would be good for a gentle stroll on Sunday.
Except that the bus to Gloomy turfed us all out at Highbury Corner - and isn't that a vastly more annoying experience when you're on pre-pay? And the buses back from Gloomy just couldn't be bothered to exist at all. And in the three or four hours in between, there's a lot of Belle & Sebastian and a lot of other good stuff. There's (some of) you, there's me, and there's dancing. Consequently, today I am hobbling like a late period Peter Cushing. Well, I guess it's a good excuse to stay still and finish The Worm Ouroboros. Yes, I will read it, for all that it's starting to get a bit much. I will not press on with BSG*, nor with Cowboy Bebop to which I have finally been introduced a mere five years or so after the V were all raving about it. No.

*To repeat a point made elsewhere, anyone who spoilers me on the Final Five, much less the Final Cylon, is going to have their own intimate encounter with a toaster.
alexsarll: (seal)
2008-12-08 07:16 pm

There There My Brigadier

Let's be perfectly clear - any appearance on the nation's screens of Brigadier* Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart is to be welcomed, but 'Enemy of the Bane' seems to have taken a big leaf out of RTD's book of Big Finales Which Make No Sense Whatsoever. spoilers )

There aren't many London venues with bones in the basement - or at least, ones that admit to it and display them. But Benjamin Franklin House is not like other venues. There didn't seem to be much in the way of mementoes of Franklin - who in my head is played by Tom Wilkinson - but it did feel old, and I like that in a venue. The show consisted of The Melting Ice Caps and The Soft Close-Ups, with both acts covering each other's songs too, quite an impressive set of permutations given that's only two people. Mr Shah namechecked me in 'Selfish Bachelor' too - "we can't all be glamorous like you, Alex Sarll" - which was lovely, but also quite surprising given that I'd just been thinking how true to my own life his line about eating breakfast in your dressing gown was.
Then on to Soul Mole, now at the Oak Bar. Which had made one rather puzzling alteration: when I've been there before for Lower The Tone, a lesbian night, the loos are stocked with free condoms. At Soul Mole, which in spite of the dancing and the bumming is mainly straight - no free condoms. This source of mild puzzlement aside, as ever a jolly good night - in particular, I'd been really needing a dance to '99 Problems'.

Battlestar Galactica having finished production, they're going to auction off the props. I'm still two seasons behind, so reluctant to investigate too closely for fear of spoilering myself.

*Technically a General since his role in foiling the Ice Warrior invasion of 1997, but everyone still calls him the Brigadier because, well, he's the Brigadier, isn't he? Geek polyfilla there, marvellous.
alexsarll: (menswear)
2008-10-04 10:59 am

Every ten seconds somewhere in the world, someone is realising I'm right

Can anyone find a definitive story on which version of Battlestar Galactica the lorry driver was watching at the wheel? Obviously there's no excuse for inattentive driving, but if he's hooked on the new version I can at least sympathise - whereas if he was watching the original, as some reports claim, then add bad taste to dangerous driving and throw away the key.

Went to that big Concrete and Glass festival last night. Well, sort of - I went to one venue right on the periphery where the only three bands who interested me* were very thoughtfully all playing not only in the same venue, but the same room. [livejournal.com profile] augstone and I attempted to take advantage of this by smuggling chairs into that room, but others, jealous of our seating, stood spitefully in front of us. Not a bad little venue, either - called the Brady Arts Centre. You could tell it didn't get used for many gigs, though; when I first walked in the lights were blinding, and you could smell the scorch as the dust burned off them, like the first time a radiator goes on in Autumn. They'd also had to bring in a bar - and not just cans, draught, but you could see the workings giving it a splendid mad scientist's lab feel - "You call me mad? I, who have created pints?" And they were using the bottom drawer of a fridge for the cashbox. A sign on the door to the garden said children shouldn't play unsupervised, because there was an open pond; I went out looking for it, didn't find it and was briefly locked out.
Weird being in Whitechapel a day after playing binge catch-up on Warren Ellis'
Freakangels.

I've been reading two biographies of peculiar writers, AJA Symons' The Quest for Corvo and Steve Aylett's Lint. Though written 70 years apart, they have a lot in common. Both writers, like so many, struggled to find success during their lifetime - something one cannot in all honestly be completely surprised at given the work. Lint's novels included I Blame Ferns, Nose Furnace and Sadly Disappointed (about a child who is not possessed by the devil); he was also the writer of the short-lived TV show Catty and the Major and the seventies comic The Caterer. Corvo wrote historical romances, translations from languages in which he was not fluent and a history of the Borgias in which he refused to use the word 'poison' and which he eventually disowned in an argument over grammar, but is best known for Hadrian the Seventh, a book in which his Mary Sue becomes Pope and saves the world, the efforts of thinly-disguised versions of his enemies notwithstanding. On which note, both had a knack for making enemies. Lint favoured the principle of 'effortless incitement', by which he was able to provoke violence even in casual passers-by, but was the subject of particular loathing from the critic and dullard Cameo Herzog (author of the Empty Trumpet books); Corvo had a spectacular feud with the Aberdeen Free Press, but beyond that was convinced that all the forces of the Catholick Church were arrayed against him (he had failed in two early bids for the priesthood, in spite of a liking for young boys). Of course, upon their deaths such enemies as had outlived them were quick to change their tune and hail their genius - something which threw several of Lint's enemies given the persistent 'Lint is dead' rumours during his lifetime. Both cut odd figures - "Lint filled the room like a buffalo, with a haircut like a Rolodex and a greying beard like a surf explosion", while Corvo described himself as a "haggard shabby shy priestly-visaged individual". Corvo claimed to have invented colour photography; from childhood Lint was obsessed with the search for new and unnamed colours. Both have been survived by their work (and in Corvo's case by his handwriting), leading to small sodalities of devotees - Stephen Fry is among Corvo's fans, while Alan Moore gives a rave review of Lint on the back of Aylett's book. Lint, described by Gore Vidal as "entering the world of letters like a fat man jumping into a swimming pool", died while writing his thankfully incomplete attempt at autobiography, The Man Who Gave Birth To His Arse; Corvo left the scandalous The Desire And Pursuit Of The Whole, having earlier declared "I am now simply engaged in dying as slowly and as publicly and as annoyingly to all of you professing and non-practising friends of mine as possible", attempted to commit suicide by gondola and then threatened to publish an edition of pornography in the names of his enemies (their crime, for the most part, that they declined to 'lend' him further money once it became clear that they were never going to get the last lot back).
Neither of these men is quite plausible, but one of them is real.

"Oddly inspiring and supremely pointless" - Andrew from Swimmer One interviews Bill Drummond.

Bran Mak Morn - the movie. With a Solomon Kane film also in the works, could it be that one day not that far away, Robert E Howard will no longer just be known as 'the Conan guy'?
(The director's past work does not enthuse me, it's true, but he does mention that he's also a fan of Slaine)

*Flipron, (The Real) Tuesday Weld and Mr Solo, whose band now contains more people than David Devant. All very good, obv.