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

Another fine Don't Stop Moving on Saturday, even if our hostess angelv was too unwell to make it, poor thing. Between the weather outside (if you hadn't noticed, it's a bit nippy) and the Camden Head's tendency to be a bit of a sweatbox I didn't know what best to wear, so ended up with the open-shirt-over-T-shirt look for the first time in ages. A lot of that about these past few days; I also went sledging for the first time in I don't know how long on Friday. I'd gone in search of a sledge on Snow Day 2009 but everywhere which might have sold one was shut on account of the snow, and I can't recall any other opportunities since I've been in London, so it could easily have been a decade. Went down to Richmond Park which always seems quite hilly, but when you specifically want a slope they suddenly prove elusive. We found one in the end, though, and one marked by a ramp constructed at the top to help get that little extra speed at the beginning which makes all the difference between 'OK' and 'GERONIMO!' Oh, I've missed it. But with the way the climate's going, I doubt I'll have to wait so long again, even if by this time next decade we will probably be using the carcasses of rival tribes instead.
With the light glittering off the snow - that unearthly orange when the sun's overhead, shifting purply-pink as it sinks to the horizon - and the parakeets brilliant green against the white background, it went some way to redeem the book I'd taken for the trip, JG Ballard's The Crystal World. Which is only the second novel I've read of his, and has all the problems of the other, Crash. He's a brilliant maker of settings or images - here, a flaw in time which has resulted in a spreading area within the African jungle becoming "that enchanted world, where by day fantastic birds fly through the petrified forest and jewelled crocodiles glitter like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline rivers". But then he doesn't quite know what to do with them so we get these rather blank characters being pointedly ambiguous as they wander around trying to show the settings to best advantage. Worse, he then starts to tell, not show, as he explains the schematic by which they're driven: "for a man so uncertain of his real nature, you can be very calculating"; "Outside this forest everything seems polarized, does it not, divided into black and white? Wait until you reach the trees, Doctor - there, perhaps, these things will be reconciled for you". Because the crystals make everything all rainbow instead, DO YOU SEE?

Something else I'd not done for a long time: watch South Park. My parents had insisted I should watch Imaginationland, then forgot, but xandratheblue obliged and...yes, it's still hilarious. And you can still defend it as satire if you're embarrassed about laughing at silly stuff. Calling it 'shocking' is a cliche, but one thing did shock me - all the copyrighted characters running around. Totoro, Snarf, a bunch of DC heroes...for sure, there are satire exemptions in the US, but I've read a ton of US-published satires of the Justice League which still had to use analogues of Flash, Superman and Wonder Woman, not the real (or real imaginary) things.
(And I've since seen an EDF ad for some new eco-tariff which not only uses Superman, but gets in footage from what looks to be every film and TV incarnation of the character. For a big name I could understand it, but EDF?)

A Facebook friend has directed me to a way around Spotify's invite process; obviously, as I have an account I can't confirm it still works,but I offer it in the hope it does. The great thing about Spotify is that now you can listen to albums you wouldn't even have bothered stealing. Consider The Kinks' ill-adised rock opera Soap Opera, a rather clunking satire on the celebrity machine. As a product of one of the great bands of the sixties (it's basically between them, the Stones and the Zombies for the crown), I want to hear it. But, given how much better stuff they made, and how much great music other people made, and how much my heart is already pledged elsewhere, then realistically, within a hundred-year span, I'm only going to want to listen to Soap Opera a handful of times. Is it really worth having it sat on my hard drive all the rest of that time? Nope. And this way, Ray Davies may eventually see thruppence ha'penny from my listens, and I wish him well of it.

People who've yet to see The Wire - are you sick of those who have going on about it? The first episode is legitimately streaming here 'til the end of the week, so you can so easily find out what the fuss is about. Yes, it's about drug dealers, and the first one is free. Anyway, that'll give you some idea of quite why everyone gets so excited about the show, but I've just finished the third season, and dear heavens it gets even better - and, hard as it may be to believe, even more bleak. There are glimmers of light, hope and humanity, for sure - but overall, and especially coming straight from the Potter and Rome conclusions, I feel bloody desolate. If Jacqui Smith really wants new ideas on reducing the harm caused by drugs, she could really not do better than watching these first three series.

Staying with the theme of social collapse, AK47: The Story Of The People's Gun is a deeply frustrating book. Michael Hodges has clearly done his research - meeting General Kalashnikov (and visiting the brothel in the original manufacturing plant), getting shot at in Iraq, interviewing former child soldiers - but fundamentally, he's written articles for Esquire and it shows. He has the glimmerings of a theme - the AK as brand, as revolutionary totem, as a devil which poisons every culture it touches - but he's never quite able to bring them into the light. But just as anyone with an AK is a killing machine (Mikhail Kalashnikov went a lot further than Sam Colt towards making man equal), anyone writing about the AK can terrify you. Reading about the state of Kalashnikov cultures, I found myself looking up and down the Tube thinking, dear heavens, imagine London's nutters and monsters equipped with these. And then the next chapter tells me that in the late nineties there was at least one AK47 in Finsbury Park mosque and it has never been recovered.

Copyright term on sound recordings to remain 50 years because "extending the term could harm Britain's trade balance and provide little practical benefit to artists while hampering creativity and consumers"; ageing musos and industry plutocrats predictably throw toys out of pram.