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

Gerald Butler as Captain Britain? I've only knowingly seen him in 300, based on which I can see that working. THIS! IS! BRITAIN!

Not sure why I've not updated for a week; I think perhaps I've either been too busy or too tired. What occurred? Another fine Keith TOTP show, this one at the Flowerpot (formerly the Bullet, which I visited once, and before that the Verge which I visited I don't know how many times). Then Panda Day; the story of panda day is here except that does not mention how Miyazaki's fundamental mistake in this early work was making Josef Fritzl the cute lead in his film. After that, went to send fugitivemotel off, again, the night this time ending with whisky and headshots. On Friday I sobered up around 2pm and went to pick up my comics backlog, and I enjoyed them all well enough but still find myself glad I don't have a comics blog because I have nothing of any consequence to say about any of them. Then along Oxford Street for the first time in months, and isn't it a dismal shambles these days? Like a closing down sale for a nation. Whereas Crouch End was in particularly fecund and Lovecraftian form, such that muttering invocations to Shub-Niggurath seemed only right and proper.
And then the weekend, with birthday picnics and croquet - or, in other words, excuses to start drinking mid-afternoon and carry on 'til well past dark, even if your croquet skills are as lamentable as mine. Primrose Hill is particularly lovely at and after nightfall, not sure why I've never done that before.

Watching Gonzo is interesting in that for every Hunter S Thompson myth it reinforces, it reminds you of a place where the story is wrong. Like, the whole run for Sheriff in Aspen was doomed, not because he was such a rebel candidate, but simply because he wasn't a very good public speaker before '72 - awkward, mumbling, lack of eye contact. All traits which he worked around once he 'became a cartoon', and for all that he felt trapped by that, for all that he seems to have killed himself partly because he was 'getting in the way of the myth' - what else could he have done? His first wife tearfully says that his suicide wasn't brave, that it was cowardly in "a time when a together Hunter Thompson could make a difference in this country". But surely the lesson of his work on the 1972 campaign is that, at a previous time when the country needed him, he was together and he did his best - and he achieved nothing. Well, nothing except giving us a wonderful record of one man's despair and bafflement, but can we expect anyone to keep doing that when it's clearly such painful work?

Finally seen No Country For Old Men and...well, OK, it's not actively awful like most films which win loads of Oscars lately, but I don't quite understand the fuss. But then, The Big Lebowski aside, I never did quite get the Coens - they make films I watch once and enjoy, but then feel no urge ever to revisit. I will concede that, in Anton Chigurh, the film has one mesmerising performance, and that its reluctance to go for one of the standard thriller resolutions is commendable. I'll further admit that their sense of whimsy does a lot to leaven the relentless, slightly monotonous bleakness which put me off Cormac McCarthy when I tried to read another of his - this is as much a film about bad service and dumb questions as heists gone wrong. But at no stage was I either as gripped, or as amused, as I was watching Psychoville. At no stage did I find myself thinking that yes, this is what film-making is about, which I felt plenty during last week's Ghostbusters marathon (and how had I never twigged before that the Warden from Oz = Winston the black Ghostbuster, aka Ernie Hudson?).
Also: while finding that No Country For Old Men link above, I learned that next year will see a Clash of the Titans remake. As much as I hate moaning about remakes - so predictable, so lacking in historical sense, so selective in its examples - I do feel fairly confident that this one deserves to be stopped by rampaging stop-motion monsters.

Michael Moorcock interview in which we learn that he doesn't read SF, and feels something of the same rage towards the steampunk he helped birth as his mate Alan Moore does towards the grim'n'gritty trend in comics. Bless the old curmudgeon. If nothing else it got me to dig out some more of his End of Time stories - possibly my favourite of his work, given they concern near-omnipotent immortals heavily inspired by the 1890s, who live out Earth's twilight in a round of parties and fads. My people, in other words.

I've already bemoaned the cancellation of Captain Britain and MI:13, but the new issue suggests that it's not even going to go out with its standards intact. By which I mean no slur on the writing or the art, but someone in lettering and/or editorial has let through a 'your' for a 'you're', a 'corps' for 'corpse' and a couple of other, lesser infelicities. Poor show. Phonogram, on the other hand, came through with my favourite issue so far of the second series, because after sweet little Penny and normal Marc, now we have an issue devoted to the first series' Emily Aster, a vain, damaged and in many ways quite annoying young woman. ie, just the kind of person who it's great to have around because she keeps you on your toes - and doubly so in fiction where she's can't really cut loose on you. I'm also left intrigued as to whether, for instance, we'll ever find out what that townie girl was doing at an indie night like Never On A Sunday. Although, I do slightly dispute Emily's test for whether a club's indie (is she more likely to hear a record which sold eight copies in 1977 than whatever's Number One now?). The rules are: if the flyer lists bands - whatever those bands are - then it's an indie club. If it lists DJs, it's a dance club. And if it lists drinks promotions, it's a pop club.

I've learned my lesson when it comes to talking online about pubs I hope to use regularly (curse you, Neil Morrissey!) but since I'm not in West London very often, I have no hesitation in making this recommendation to those who are. The Pelican, near Portobello Road, loses points for a lack of draught cider, but since all the drinks seem to be the same price anyway, I object less to Bulmers. Good decor, properly twilit like an old-style pub but not scuzzy. Not bad music, except for the reggae. But here's the clincher - Thursday, from 6pm to 9pm, you order your drinks and then roll two dice. The bar also rolls two dice. You roll higher - your drinks are free. You don't - you just pay what you would have anyway. Obviously the gamer in me thinks that this lacks nuance - double 6 should be a critical hit, where you also get champagne, while on a double 1 you have critically failed, pay double and get punched in the face. But hey, it's their business. And I did see three double 1s rolled by punters, once twice by the same guy, so I can see how that might lose custom.
Portobello Road, though - that was one of the first London locations etched in my mind ("street where the riches of ages are sold"), and it looks to be dying on its arse. Half the shops are shut and look like that's long-term, and the rest were short on customers. Really took me aback. As did the 'coming attractions' signboard still up on the Astoria, and the realisation that Don Draper is only 35. Meaning that in the first series of Mad Men, set 18 months earlier, he was presumably 33. He can't only be two years older than me, he's a grown-up!

The first issue of Neil Gaiman's Batman story...maybe it was just because I read it drunk, but I have no idea where he's going with this. It is nonetheless brilliant, and coming so hot on the heels of Grant Morrison's third definitive take on the character, that's impressive. In other comics news, Kieron Gillen's Sabretooth one-shot is probably not essential reading for all Phonogram fans, but is pretty good, and the new issue of Captain Britain has DRACULA MEETING DOCTOR DOOM ON THE MOON. I love comics.

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.