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

Feels like life has been fairly quiet of late, (except when it hasn't, of course - Hyde Park picnics, Leyton pubs that are at least decently apologetic about hating my people, SE14's answer to the Shaftesbury). But in early summer, especially this year as it's still picking up from the tardy spring, I don't mind that. The evenings are still simply beautiful, without that complex melancholy they acquire later on - though it would help if I had the park for them, when instead it's being turned into some sort of prison camp for Madchester arseholes (sorry, tautology, I know). Still, I've had my chances to go a-roaming - up trees, over banks, through hedges and across a Heath resplendent with buttercups like I've never seen. Even got to share a tree with a jay at one point - a much better companion than parakeets, who may be beautiful, but in prolonged proximity are no better than the sort of person who wears Beats By Dre headspeakers. Guessed a stranger's dog's name, too - though given my guess was Slobberchops, based on obvious physical features, I don't think that's much proof of psychic potential.

Been watching a lot of adventure series lately - The Avengers, Brisco County Jr, Adventure Time - and hardly any films. One exception: Night of the Eagle, which as the name suggests is close kin to the MR James adaptation Night of the Demon. Peter Wyngarde - excellent value as ever - plays a sixties Richard Dawkins who discovers his wife's a closet witch and makes her burn her "protections", after which their lives go about as smoothly as you'd expect. There are loose plot threads all over the place and it doesn't even seem quite sure whether magic works or not in its world, but it's thoroughly eerie nonetheless. Spartacus ended for good, and Doctor Who for now; the former was the downer it was always going to be, the latter much better than I'd dared expect, though it may have helped that I had the contrast of having just finished the rambling Reign of Terror, the first full Hartnell I've attempted in a decade or more.

And then after 'The Name of the Doctor' there was Eurovision, in which as ever the worthy victor was robbed - this time it was Romania (or rather Romoania) with the gay dubstep vampire. We left after that and Bonnie Tyler to see The French Electric live down the road, sounding like the National before they went boring, covering songs from Dare! and getting away with it. They were followed by a tragic act who could have sounded like Mazzy Star or Lana del Rey if only the drums had been turned down (or preferably off), which was my cue to depart. Thee Faction and Joanne Joanne at the Buffalo Bar were excellent, same as last time they played there together, and once again I drank entirely too much. Possibly because I'd realised that, if they're a genderswapped Duran Duran and Keith and I had been hanging with them in the pub earlier, that made us genderswapped 'Girls on Film' video babes. I should possibly be seeing them again tonight, but outside was calling, and I'm still in a certain amount of gig-shock after seeing the Art Brut birthday gig on what they weren't allowed to call the Glass Ceiling Tour. Ten years! They've learned a lot in that time, though. And the Scala...I'd forgotten how much I liked that venue. I'd forgotten how much I like the rare big gig - and it turns out they do still exist - where the crowd Get It. And the support slot from Keith et al wasn't bad either - I think the best show I've seen them do since the Devant support with the spiralling, near-infinite 'One Thing After Another'. They're a big band, a big stage suits them.

Anyway, my dears, I think I need another cup of decaf tea before Justified. It's a rock'n'roll life and no mistake.

Managed to get a bit further afield over the weekend. On Friday, to Old Street - yes, technically it's walking distance, but still. I've never been to the Foundry before, in spite of its KLF connections, but I like it; proper East London eccentricity, as opposed to East London dullards desperately trying to look eccentric like so many venues in the area. Admittedly I did briefly think that the latest Barley craze was for stupidly oversized bags which are really inconvenient in a crowded bar, but then I realised that the place was popular with genuine cycle couriers, which is fair enough. Then on to the Bedroom Bar, which looks like the 'cool club' set from a TV show, and for all I know may have been used as one. Not quite my scene, but in the sort of way where I can still wish it well and feel happy for the people who've found their place there, even the ones who aren't already my friends.
Saturday night was Hackney, specifically the Old Ship, return venue for darkmarcpi's birthday after a break last year. Formerly a pleasantly shabby pub, it is now an 'urban inn'. In brief, that means a gastropub with random capitalisation on the signage, a bit of apostrophe crime, and rooms upstairs. "Why not turn a Good night into a Great night." ask signs in the loos, without a question mark. Translation: "If you've pulled, but you reckon even the taxi ride will be long enough for her to sober up, why not drop £70 on a room upstairs and get right down to it? Yeah, this is Hackney and that's considerably more than you'd pay for a prostitute round here, but the clientele here are considerably cleaner and slightly less likely to nick all your money for crack." Classy.
Then on Sunday, properly out of home territory and down to Putney for the Tubewalk. Sunshine! Riverside! Flowers! Parkour! A large dead fish! A pub with a sign forbidding buggies that implied a terrible past! And no fewer than seven pugs, although I imagine atommickbrane will be blogging them in more detail.

I'm reading Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop - A History of the Hip Hop Generation and, after the preamble setting the scene in the Bronx and Jamaica, I'm just at the part where DJ Kool Herc invents hip hop. The best bit of which is that, in a music subsequently so handicapped by an obsession with "keeping it real", Herc tells us about how important it was to lose his Jamaican accent, a process which in places involved singing along to his parents' Jim Reeves records.
(And the godfather of subway graffiti, Cornbread, was apparently just doing it to impress a girl called Cynthia. Just like poor bloody Davis in that Graham Greene book I was reading. Similarly, while reading about Kool Herc I also find myself with another volume of Marvel's The Incredible Hercules, featuring the original Herc. Connections everywhere)

Bruce Sterling interview which I strongly suspect has been filleted for a 'death of the novel' angle. The death of decent interviews in the mainstream media might be a better topic; see also that Pet Shop Boys interview in Saturday's Guardian mag, which devoted about half as much space to interviewing one of the best and most readable bands in Britain as it did to pictures of them in £1300 parkas which look functionally indistinguishable to the ones various of my friends have and which, in the cases where I know how much they cost, seem generally to have been in the low double figures. Still, not quite as offensive as the Alexa Chung 'recession chic' special a couple of weeks back (buy British - but designer British, ie still hundreds per cardigan and 45 frakking pounds for socks).

Off to Devon for most of this week; see you all on the other side.

From some of the press its minor rebrand received, you'd have thought Rise was being transformed into Nuremberg N4, rather than having its slogan tweaked from "Unite Against Racism" to the cheerier "Celebrating Diversity". I can attest to a disappointing lack of torchlit rallies, lynch-mobs or BoriSS corps. Although the pedestrian Brit rapper on the bill ("before Oysters there was two pound travelcards" - bless) did get everyone to put one hand in the air and chant "One nation, one people", which perhaps could have done with a rethink.
Highlights: Kitty, Daisy & Lewis' old-time rock'n'roll worked surprisingly well in a sunny field at lunchtime (where 'lunch' = 'gin'). The Aliens would have bored me rigid in a traditional gig setting, but as very loud background noise, they were just the ticket. Beardyman is impressive in a way very few beatboxers can manage, and once the Dub Pistols got Terry Hall on (for 'Our Lips Are Sealed', 'Problem Is' and 'Gangsters'), they were glorious.
Also, the man who'd got around the ban on dogs by smuggling his dachshund in a bag.
Lowlights: The aforementioned rappers, comprehensively pwned when the DJ followed their set with 'Witness (One Hope)' to show how UK rap should be done. Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings - even if I hadn't seen them on Jools Holland, I would still class them as 'Jools Holland music'. Everything I saw on my brief tour of the other stages, including one band who sounded like the Brand New Heavies, and some clowns called Yabba Funk with a song whose title translated as 'Victory to Africa' - whatever angle I look at that sentiment from, it's at best meaningless and at worst vile.
But below all that - CSS. Dear heavens. I was never quite as caught up in them as some people - possibly because I only thought Lovefoxxx 'quite cute' rather than collapsing into the same paroxysms as many - but they made some fun party tracks. Since when they've got miserable, learnt how to play, improved their English and stopped being randomly rude - ie, systematically erased everything people liked about them. Oh, and picked up a new drummer from The Cooper Temple Clause, a band I liked but who judging from this and the other one's stint with the tit from the Libertines, have taken some sort of oath of post-TCTC rubbishness so as not to eclipse their legacy. Lovefoxxx attempts to bring some liveliness to proceedings by coming on in hard hat, facial stripes and a cloak, but that cannot disguise what a dreadfully dull band they have become. A couple of songs in, I cannot take it anymore - "If the next song's not 'Death from Above', I'm going". It's not. I go, and sit on the Parkland Walk reading Philip K Dick for a bit instead.

Other than that I have been:
Seeing MJ Hibbett's My Exciting Life In Rock preview;
Reading Ian Kelly's new Casanova biography, which is extremely funny, very well-researched, and was apparently proofread by a dyslexic chimpanzee;
Building castles in the clouds.