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

It is, as has been widely observed, Spring. Markedly earlier than last year, albeit marred by the loss of several trees which always made my commute a little less of a chore (lost to developers' cupidity, too, rather than the storms). Though I did also get to see some of the more impressive consequences of the storms when I took a trip down to the margin of the English Riviera to see the Dawlish destruction (and peculiar retail complex Trago Mills, which was a scene of carnage in an existential rather than a weather-damage sense).

Back in London, I've been to a model railway show, which apart from its inherent delights (tiny trains!) was a real corrective to any idea that the crowd at the Geeks Inc Doctor Who and comics pub quizzes could be considered particularly male-heavy or poorly-socialised. I've learned that some pubs think a table booking is for a two-hour stretch (yes, that is 'pub', not 'prestigious restaurant'). I attended a late opening at the Wallace Collection and enjoyed the empty rooms more than the performances, especially when we found the armour you could try on. I've taken pointlessly precarious routes across the junction of the Limehouse Cut and Bow Creek, had the first ice creams of the season, marked Purim and encountered the usual run of new pubs, some to be cherished (the North Pole and its range of oddly appropriate ciders) and others less so.

Not very many gigs lately, and two of the ones there were were at Paper Dress, a thoroughly Hoxton boutique/venue hybrid which is a lot less annoying than that description would have guaranteed a few years back. Both Mikey Georgeson and the Soft Close-Ups did pretty well there, which I suppose indicates that they at least pay proper attention to sound &c, rather than treating the juxtaposition of functions as sufficient gimmick in itself. Would that all venues could say the same. The last time I went to Power Lunches, they were steadily running out of drinks through the evening, in the manner of shambolic venues everywhere. This time, they had a solution to that - don't have anyone serving (upstairs) until the first band takes to the stage (downstairs). And, just to make absolutely sure there's a rude cunt talking at the back of gigs at your venue, why not hire him as the sound engineer? Though even he had the sense to shut up during Quimper. As who wouldn't, because while they're lovely folk offstage, during the performance they seem to channel something altogether alien and unfriendly (this is a good thing, obviously). Next up was Pete Um, of whom I've heard much and by whom I've heard a little, but whom I've never seen live. This turns out to have been a major oversight. Somewhere, in a world where the story of pop begins with and is dominated by John Shuttleworth, punk sounded like this.
Had something of a disagreement with the minicab driver after; fortunately, weaponised posh accents won the day for the cause of justice. See, they're not just for destroying the structure of the nation.

Finally, someone's talking seriously about getting rid of Tube drivers. Let's start by ditching the people who are paid to get on the DLR, nick the front seat one carefully positioned oneself to grab at Bank, and then pretend to drive just as one was doing oneself before being so rudely interrupted.

Another local comedy preview this week, which I think it would be fair to say was a little less polished than the first, plus two gigs with a Georgeson connection; the Soft Close-Ups, on a stage covered inexplicably but beautifully in confetti, fit a cover of Mr Solo's 'Astrology' into the set, alongside a does-it-count-as-a-cover of Luxembourg's 'About Time'; the rest of their set is as expected, but it's not as if they play often enough for these songs to lose their sparkle. David Devant themselves, on the other hand...maybe it's like Larry Niven's concept of mana as a finite resource, but I find myself wondering if all the belief the World Cup is taking up means less iconic energy to go around elsewhere, because until the encore they are merely 'very good', as against the usual 'magical'. Perhaps part of the problem is that I have seen in the pub beforehand that Foz? has a swanee whistle, a kazoo and a duck call, but none of them make a noticeable show during the gig. It's like having a gun on the wall in the first act and then not firing it by the end of the third. Except quackier.

Spent yesterday in the centre - and without sighting a single elephant, though I did happen upon Postman's Park at last. The goal of the expedition, though, was the Hunterian Museum. Supposedly it's a resource for surgical education, but most of the stuff there can serve no purpose except freaking people out. The disembodied circulatory system of a baby, in particular, will follow me through my nightmares, and there was a syphilitic cock in a jar whose eye follows you around the room. Some of it is simply random - a jar containing a tapir's anus, another with the nipple of a horse - while other relics are celebrity underskin, like Jonathan Wild's skeleton or half of Babbage's brain. Hideous, yet wonderful. Very London.

Watching a passable Nabokov travelogue/documentary yesterday, mention was made of the (twice) near-burning of Lolita at the back of Vladimir's house on Seneca Street. And that Wire book I'm reading had made mention of how hard a time David Simon had convincing HBO to make the show, and even then, its survival beyond the third season was by no means certain. And I started thinking, that's what I'd do with a gate between alternate worlds. Not save or conquer parallels that had gone awry, just take people through the stuff that never got made, or never survived. There's plenty we're missing, too - the full runs of Aztek and Big Numbers, more than half of The Canterbury Tales. It would be a productive cultural exchange, and you could make a fortune in the process. Win/win.
(Of course, there'd be a 'Library of Babel' problem where once you started looking you'd find an infinite number of slightly different versions of each lost classic - and indeed, of each extant one. And you'd go mad trying to find the best of them all. This is my problem, even in my daydreams I'm overwhelmed by the endless ramifications of everything)

Saturday night: finally a purpose to the existence of The X Factor manifests, as it delays the start of Soul Mole, meaning I can after all go see the Indelicates. Briefly I wonder whether this is such a good idea - they were so very perfect the last couple of times I saw them, surely this can only disappoint? See parenthesis above; I think too hard sometimes. They are bassless, and have a questionable backing track for 'Savages', so in that sense they are imperfect. But, somehow it still works, feels different not worse. When you're operating within the field of greatness, there's a lot of variation possible without diminution. Support is Keith TOTP, who is very loud and covers 'Lonely This Christmas' while wearing a black Santa hat emblazoned with 'Bah Humbug'. Good stuff.
Then on to Soul Mole for the usual dance-'til-feet-hurt-then-keep-dancing fun. I think it may now be the club I've been attending longest? If so, it richly deserves that.
On my Sunday trip to beingjdc's annual festive bash, the first bendy bus has a bit of a spasm and the back doors won't shut. The driver tries to fix the bus by...turning it off and on again. It doesn't work. Their end cannot come too soon. The two I got yesterday behaved rather better, admittedly, as I made a late visit to the bafflingly-redesigned 12 Bar to see that rare beast, a Soft Close-Ups show. The promised elephants are absent, but as well as their own songs (and while 'Ditch The Theory' remains my favourite, 'Fireworks' is rapidly closing on it) we get a rather beautiful cover of 'Life on the Crescent'. As a Devant song, I know a lot of people love it, but I never quite felt it fit the band. Here, it belongs.

Boris scrapped his first bendy buses today. His reign has now justified itself, and anything else is just a bonus.

If you ever find yourself having a terrible moment of clarity about the gigging scene, wondering whether it isn't just a terrible parade of narcissists and special needs cases taking the name of art in vain - seriously, go see an open mic poetry night and your worries will vanish in an instant.
The band-based elements of the evening worked rather better (OK, shambolically - but entertainingly so, particularly the version of 'Unity Mitford' which, courtesy of a clown's guitar, ended up somewhere between Slash and 'My Lovely Horse'), and one of the Indelicates-affiliated poets (plays god in The Book of Job - The Musical, apparently) had his moments. And afterwards, after one of my occasional forays into roadieing (roadying?), we met some very generous but totally lost fruit thieves. But the open mic stuff...OK, if you do take the advice in the first paragraph, be aware that you do so at your own risk.

There's an art exhibition underway in the 'phone boxes behind the Royal Academy - because apparently that's where rejected pictures for the Summer Exhibition get left. It's pseudonymous, perhaps for legal reasons, but...well, some of the booths are quite shiney on the inside, shall we say. I like the postcard reading 'email mum' in among the tart cards, but possibly the most powerful contribution is the way that one of the booths has an overwhelming smell of stale urine - undoubtedly a comment on the degree to which Marcel Duchamp's urinal has at once defined and limited so much modern art. Right?

A lot of people have suggested - I hope in jest - that unemployment would see me getting into daytime TV. Even before the age of the DVD box set, I had quite enough reading and wandering to catch up on that this was never going to happen, but I was looking forward to some classic "films so sad they're only shown when the country's at work", and until this week I'd been disappointed. Sure, there were some Powell & Pressburgers, but I already have those on DVD (having got into them, if memory serves, through a screening of A Matter of Life and Death last time I was dole scum, a decade back), some Miyazaki I've already seen on Film4, but this week there was finally something new (well, old, obviously, but new to me). First, Jimmy Cagney in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. My policy of attempting any film which has given the Flaming Stars a title doesn't always work out - I think the only real great I ever found that way was The Day the Earth Caught Fire, and plenty were abandoned in short order - but this is a nice, nasty little gangster flick of the old school, all greed and brutality and innocence led astray in a world where, Production Code or no, it's clear there was no other choice. And then on Thursday, Frank Capra's Lost Horizon, the original Shangri-La story, which influenced everything from Iron Fist to Neal Stephenson's Anathem but has a tragic, terribly real escapism all its own, Ronald Colman the great diplomat who finds an earthly paradise away from all the struggle of the outside world - but can he bear to stay there, and if he does, what will it cost him? So seductive, and so much more topical than whichever catchpenny nonsense is being shown in primetime about the State of Things, with the inhabitants of the happy valley perplexed by the pointless avarice of the outside world: "Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! What unintelligent leadership! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity, crashing headlong against each other, propelled by an orgy of greed and brutality."

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.

There have been some really good clouds this week, haven't there?

I only had a three day work week, and over the last two nights I've seen two of my very favourite bands, The Indelicates, and David Devant & his Spirit Wife. I have rambled ecstatically about both of them on numerous occasions before, so let us just say that this makes me very happy.
Before the Indelicates, we had Lily Rae (who reminded me at different points of Kirsty MacColl, Ute Lemper and PJ Harvey, but more than anything reminded me of the experience of listening to Amy Winehouse's first album and knowing that there's something remarkable there, but it hasn't quite hatched yet. Definitely someone on whom I intend to keep an eye.
Also, Keith TOTP And His Minor UK Indie Celebrity AllStar Backing Band, who possibly bit off more than they could chew by playing 'Anyone Fancy A Chocolate Digestive?' when less than half the band had heard it before, much less played it. At one point I did fear they might be stuck playing it forever if thedavidx didn't work out a way to tell them when to end it.

Before Devant, though...that was something else. Met augstone in Dray Walk, which is clearly the epicentre of Earth's hipness. I could feel it pressing in on me, like the atmosphere of Jupiter but with haircuts. Then returned to Vessel's art exhibition for the closing show, with performances by Mr Solo and martylog. After which...a procession. I like processions, it's just a shame they're normally associated with causes. I suppose this one was too, a bit, but the signs were stuff like THIS IS HEAVY, and DOWN WITH SIGNS, and CLAP. Initially Aug had the CLAP, but then he left me with it, which I wasn't that happy about. Until, as we made our way along Portobello Road, some people did clap. And then outside a restaurant, Foz? (who was dressed as an orang utan) serenaded some diners with his pink ukelele, and I held the CLAP sign above him, and people clapped. This may be the proudest moment of my life to date.

Why did Day Watch get such bad reviews? It doesn't have the shocking novelty of Night Watch, obviously, but otherwise it seemed a worthy successor in every way. Possibly it even had more of an emotional core, without that feeling as tacked on as it can in genre adventure films. Plus, some great bodyswap comedy. I love bodyswap comedy, so long as I don't have to watch a whole film of it.

Isn't today meant to bring the worst storm in 20 years? I'm looking out the window and seeing gently waving branches, non-storm-clouds and patches of blue sky. Meteorology: it's like astrology except that you get taken seriously by people who don't read the red-tops.

Last night I saw The Vessel, Eddie Argos and company go glam. Well, I say that - it was actually one of the more subdued outfits I've seen Vessel wear, but Eddie's jumpsuit was quite something. Paranoid Dog Bark: top fun.

Checking out the week's TV schedules, there are only two things I want to see on terrestrial - and they both start at 9pm on Thursday. Nice work there, BBC. OK, most of the other stuff turns up on terrestrial within a week of its Freeview airing, but others never will; I'm not even sure I want to watch Tin Sandwich, Anyone? - A History Of The Harmonica, but bless BBC4 for making and showing it. I definitely do want to watch the final part of their Worlds of Fantasy, though I had definite issues with the second episode, about Tolkien and Mervyn Peake. The timeline the programme suggested, particularly coming after the previous episode about the child hero, has Tolkien applying his academic mind and singlehandedly crafting the fairytales and children's stories into modern fantasy. I overemphasise slightly - but still, where was the acknowledgment of Lord Dunsany or James Brance Cabell, cultish figures now but pretty big back in the (pre-Tolkien) day? What about the pulp authors? Sure, Clark Ashton Smith is all too easy a figure to overlook, but everybody's heard of Conan so some brief nod to Robert E Howard, please. Perhaps most important of all - isn't it worth mentioning that Tolkien was a key figure in making fantasy a genre, and that before him someone like Hope Mirrlees or Sylvia Townsend Warner could write the odd book we would now class that way in a career we wouldn't? What frustrates me is not even leaving these writers out of history; I'm used to that. It's that even if you do know about them, Tolkien still achieved something unique and remarkable, and I'd have loved to see the opinions of some of these talking heads - China Mieville, say, or Dianna Wynne Jones (Toyah Wilcox less so) on what exactly that something was. The closest I can come is to say that there's a solidity to Middle Earth, as against the more fabulist fantasy of Tolkien's predecessors and peers. It's not a fairyland; its rules are not so very different from our world's.
And that brings us to the real elephant in the room - Tolkien's influence. The talking heads were all happy to claim a Gormenghast influence, but Tolkien was discussed more as shaping the whole form than as a personal guiding light. Understandably, because Tolkien's a bit like The Doors: great, but anything taking him as a direct influence, sucks. Good fantasy draws on that earlier tradition, or Peake's phantasmagoria; the crappy sagas clogging up the shelves owe Tolkien. The only way anything good ever comes from that road is in opposition, turning on the debased tropes of Fantasyland with the wit of a Terry Pratchett or the savagery of George RR Martin. the solidity of Tolkien's subcreation inspired mere stolidity; he was a genius whose great work unwittingly turned a whole field into mush for decades.

Great Grant Morrison news: Seaguy 2: Slaves of Mickey Eye is go! The interview (containing links to previous parts) also contains indications of a possible reconciliation with Millar, and news that there's still no progress on reprinting my favourite comic ever, Flex Mentallo. Remember that next time you wait for the trade.
In other comics news, I just tried to read the first issue of Pax Romana. The set-up sounded good (Vatican vs islam Time Wars), the art style's interesting, and I think the script's probably OK - but I couldn't get in to it through the lettering. I've never held with the idea that the letterer's doing his job if you don't notice the lettering - not noticing Todd Klein or Dave Sim's lettering would be a terrible waste - but I think this is the first time lettering has killed my interest in a book. Though maybe it doesn't help that I've just finished the best papal comic going, Kirkman's Battle Pope.

That line makes more sense now the charts mean nothing much, doesn't it? And David Devant's show on Friday...it was only an inchoate feeling until someone else put it into words for me, but it had an air of finality. Ten years on from the debut album, which was meant to make them stars, they played it in order. First track of the encore, the track which came as a free 7" with the vinyl version. And then apparently thrashing through every other song that came to mind...they did say that they'd see us in three years for the Shiney on the Inside anniversary show, but I'm not especially expecting to see them before that. I don't know, maybe it was just the hearing-album-in-order thing that got me. I've only seen that done before at launch shows, not commemorations.
As first support, the Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra were as delightful as ever; I especially enjoyed watching their effect on the uninitiated. And Boogaloo Stu was entertaining enough, even if his outfit was a little *too* tight. But The Reality (edit: apparently these were They Came From The Stars I Saw Them, lying)...I can only surmise that they're sponsored by tobacco industry, because they had the non-smokers heading out on their mates' fag breaks, just to get away. The 100 Club itself, it should be noted, *stinks*. Not the gym fug of the Borderline, more the hospital corridor smell of cheap industrial cleaner. David Devant did provide card Fantasy Fags, but they never got round to enacting whatever magic might have empowered them. And on top of the smell...I saw a psster for a George Melly show. And this set me thinking, a little later, all we need now to sum up everything that's made this past week so abysmal is a Fopp poster. Turn around, and there's an ad for an instore right behind me. From that point on I was just surprised by the absence of Catherine Tate.

The Purple Turtle, on the other hand, doesn't smell at all bad; surprising, I know. But the evening...in terms of the music and such, I still like Stay Beautiful. I find Client fairly boring, but inoffensive, especially since they seem to have laid off the faux sapphism. But the clientele, my dears! So many very ugly people. And I mean that in terms of behaviour as much as anything, though be assured, many of the faces and outfits definitely qualify too. I'm sure it's not normally like this, but it has really rather shaken me.

Bear in mind, I couldn't (until now) investigate people's objections to the end of Heroes in any depth for fear of spoilers - but I get the impression that it was widely loathed. Whereas I'm just vaguely disappointed in the way I often am at the end of big superhero stories by the decisions taken with too much of an eye on the franchise's value and too little on the story. Some bits, though, just don't make sense. ( Queries, incorporating spoilers )
As ever, it is Hiro's arc whose development interests me most.
Still, at least The Shield is still on top form. I've meandered enough before about the bleakness of its moral universe, to general disinterest on here, but this week's episode found another marvellous way to play that.

"Speaking in Hull, the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, said..."I'm hoping that the central government will match up to what the council is trying to do. The response should be quick, fast and swift.""
Is there even a word for going past tautology and using *three* synonymous terms? Perhaps we should just file this as further evidence for Hitchens' argument that, where once the finest minds had nowhere to go but the clergy, times are very different now.