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

Watching The Mary Whitehouse Experience again in 2010, it's amazing how well it's aged. Yes, some of the topical jokes were now totally lost on me, let alone younger members of the audience*. Others have been overtaken by events - who knew at the time that John Major really was a secret shagger, albeit with Edwina Currie rather than Marilyn Monroe? But overall...yes, it's still funny that M Khan is bent.

Saw Scarlet's Well for the first time in ages last night. They're a much quieter, less rambunctious band than they used to be, but still with that core of British strangeness which snared me; they've not stopped telling tales of the strange little town of Mousseron, it's just later at night there now. The support were appropriately gentle too - Pocketbooks were twee in the best possible way, while Vatican Cellars, who for some reason I had expected when I heard about them to be spiky and noisy and a bit Paper Chase, are more gently Bathers or Dreamers or someone else on whom I can't quite put my finger. Then home to finish off Carnivale - in so far as one can ever finish a cancelled series. The end of its second season did, though, feel like a natural ending, in a way that the cut-off point of, say, Deadwood did not. Any further seasons would have been a very different show, and given the portentousness and occasional hamminess was already more noticeable in the second series than the first, very possibly a weaker one.

Not that I do festivals myself, but I note that Glade, which I recall some friends rather liking, has been cancelled, in part because of police costs. Topical, given a festival organisation recently stated ""We are anxious about the use of a scoring system for [the cost of policing at] public events that lumps all music festivals together, without any reference to style, size or location. The score informs the level of charge and the guidance sees music festivals given the highest possible score - considerably above that of any football match.". This in spite of the considerably greater risks associated with policing the soccer. See, this is why I hate footbalism. Not the game in itself, a harmless little park pastime in its proper form. The special treatment it receives, the way it's allowed to deform transport networks, TV schedules, police budgets. Still, I have some hopes that with the passing of the New Labour regime, that horrid obsession politicians had with being seen to like footballism may also have ended.

*People can now legally drink who were not born when The Mary Whitehouse Experience first aired. Terrifying.

Spent the Bank Holiday weekend strung out along the 253 route as was - well, with one brief jaunt up to the asylum, but other than that - Bethnal Green, Clapton, Seven Sisters Road, Camden. All very jolly but I was especially glad to have Black Plastic back, rocking and packed. Visually, the erstwhile Pleasure Unit is somewhat less of a dive than previously, although they seriously need to sort out the smell. If only people could try to burn it off, it might help - particularly if the burning items were also themselves fragranced, perhaps?
And I've finished London - City of Disappearances. Which feels strange - it's such a capacious book, so it feels a little like finishing an encyclopaedia, or the dictionary. Appropriate, I suppose, given I am about to take a little break from London - though having also just finished Wodehouse's last novel, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, I'm wary of expecting too much calm and restoration from my West Country retreat.

Frustrating though it is that HBO's post-western epic Deadwood never got a proper resolution, in some ways it works out rather well. ( oblique spoilers )
And that, right there, is the birth of America, isn't it? Which is what the series was always about. Hell, you could argue HBO did give us the sequel; once we've seen how the last great attempt at founding a new society was finally bought and buried, all we need to do is spin forward 130 years to watch The Wire and see the long, drawn-out death throes implicit in that stymied birth.
(I got the impression ahead of time that Deadwood's third season was not so well-regarded as the rest; having watched it, I'm at a loss as to why that might be, and of course now I'm not scared of their spoilers, those negative reviews at which I could barely glanced have learned the ways of church mice. Perhaps it was the players, the fire-engine, the loosely-attached subplots of no immediately obvious relevance to the show's main thrust. I rather liked them, myself - they made it the story of a community, not just of the community's leaders)
And with that finished, I'm into a rather different TV proposition: Justice League Unlimited. I love that popular culture has got to the point where Aztek and Alan Moore stories are considered appropriate fodder for children's television.

Hamfatter - yes, I know they went on Dragon's Den to get funding, but they're not that bad, are they? Not great, but in the pop-bands-with-guitars field, one of the less offensive examples.

Am not convinced by the latest rejig of 2000AD's monthly sibling, the Megazine. Packaging it with a slim reprint edition is not an inherently bad idea - but the price has gone up from £2.99 to £4.99, and next week's accompanying reprint is Snow/Tiger, a perfectly good strip but also a very recent one which, like many readers, I already own in the weeklies. And while it's good, I'm not sure it's so good that I can use a surplus copy for comics evangelism, y'know?

There's a film coming of The Dark Is Rising? Starring Ian McShane and Christopher Eccleston? Why was I not informed?

So I was listening to a hyphy compilation, musing that while the lyrics might be utterly incomprehensible the backing just sounded like hip hop acts who were more into Outkast than Fiddy &c, and this set me thinking about subgenres in general, and it ended up here: there are plenty of clubs which specify that in so far as they play indie, they only play the more glam end of it. And a good thing too, obviously, because until pretty recently they were the mainstay of my clubbing life. But, even at the height of Oasis' imperial period, even with the Arsewit Monkeys ascendant, I don't ever recall seeing an indie night that only played the loutish stuff. Sure, a lot of indie clubs have always been heavier on that than the good stuff, but why have none of them ever gone exclusive? Specifically included Morrissey, Suede and Franz Ferdinand from the playlist? In the nineties at least, there must have been a market for a kind of anti-Popstarz, 'indie for real blokes wot hate poofs'.

311 Italian prisoners serving life sentences call for reintroduction of the death penalty, as preferable to their current situation.