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

Tony Hart too? That's far too many pillars of the national identity toppled in one week. Enough now, please, Mr Reaper, before Ray Davies or Stephen Fry is next.

All the walking for which I now have time and inclination has coincided, unfortunately, with some new boots which are still being worn in, and after Wednesday's excursions, I ended up with rather sore feet. No matter; all it changed on Thursday was that I Tubed from South Ken to Victoria, and since this gave me more reading time later, no harm done. Dead Letter Office is not really a dancey evening, though it's a thing of wonder to hear Subcircus' '86'd' in public in 2008; even during what passed for their heyday it was hardly a club hit. Similarly with The Vapour Trail; I was mainly there for the bands and left before the dancing got started, though it was great to hear non-obvious Cure tracks and 'Lagartija Nick', and the latter would surely have had me on the floor later. So after all this, I'm on the road to recovery and wondering where would be good for a gentle stroll on Sunday.
Except that the bus to Gloomy turfed us all out at Highbury Corner - and isn't that a vastly more annoying experience when you're on pre-pay? And the buses back from Gloomy just couldn't be bothered to exist at all. And in the three or four hours in between, there's a lot of Belle & Sebastian and a lot of other good stuff. There's (some of) you, there's me, and there's dancing. Consequently, today I am hobbling like a late period Peter Cushing. Well, I guess it's a good excuse to stay still and finish The Worm Ouroboros. Yes, I will read it, for all that it's starting to get a bit much. I will not press on with BSG*, nor with Cowboy Bebop to which I have finally been introduced a mere five years or so after the V were all raving about it. No.

*To repeat a point made elsewhere, anyone who spoilers me on the Final Five, much less the Final Cylon, is going to have their own intimate encounter with a toaster.

It may be the night when the boundaries between the worlds are at their weakest, but the main thing I expect from Hallowe'en is a chance to have a dance in my cloak. Which I got, plus the chance to stalk home through Stoke Newington and Brownswood Park afterwards. Although on this of all nights, I find it unbelievable that you can still get catcalls from oiks. It's Hallowe'en, you dreckwits! It's the one night of the year when you're meant to be dressed like this and are not being even mildly controversial by so doing! Also, you know how some people pronounce 'nuclear' as 'nucelar'? There's a reverse one about too, because I definitely heard a few 'Draclua's.
('Count Fvckula', on the other hand, is a perfectly acceptable alternative)
Anyway, Nightbeast - very rocking, but with a name like Nightbeast I fear they'll never find another gig which will live up to a Hallowe'en debut.
On Saturday I went to Feeling Gloomy's Leonard Cohen special. There should be more clubs playing Leonard Cohen.

Execrable hack Jeph Loeb has been sacked from Heroes, so I may give it another go once we get to the relevant episodes. Sadly, Marvel comics have not had the sense to do likewise. Maybe I should fake his voice, ring Sarah Palin and claim to have done her daughter?

In the run-up to the US election, I find myself very receptive to TV touching on the American Dream; I'm misting up at Simon Schama's The American Future: A History, and devouring HBO's John Adams. Which is a peculiar series, every episode seeming to exist in a different genre: the first sees a mild man radicalised, like a Mel Gibson film done right; the second, leading up to the Declaration of Independence, is the one brimming with patriotic pride; when Adams goes to Europe in the third, his hopelessly undiplomatic diplomacy in the structured courts of Europe turns the whole thing into a comedy of embarassment. And through it all comes a sort of higher patriotism - because I am, after all, not American. I'm British, hence one of the bad guys in this story (The American War of Independence - is it the only war it was ever right that Britain should lose? I'm struggling to think of another). But the ideal of America, like the ideal of Greece before it, is part of the shared heritage of humanity's better part - even if, being in the hands of humans, it has shown the human tendency to fall terribly short of the ideal.
It's weird, though - being a young country, America has a national epic where the facts and figures are a matter of record. The rest of us have myths we can recast and reinterpret, but theirs...well, the DVD finds the series accompanied by a feature called Facts Are Stubborn Things. They can play a little loose with some details - the editing of the Declaration of Independence feels like a scene from a student newspaper office, with Franklin distracted by Jefferson's other great creation, the revolving chair. But Franklin still talks mainly in Franklin quotations, and we have yet to see George Washington with an outfit or facial expression other than the one from that portrait.

In the same time period, I've finally finished the Talleyrand biography I've been reading on-and-off for ages. Was amused to read that after Waterloo, various well-meaning English liberals attempted to use writs of habeas corpus to prevent Napoleon's rendition to exile in St Helena. This, remember, is after he has already escaped from one, gentle exile on Elba, left Europe in tatters, caused the death of thousands and even left France in a considerably worse position than it was after his first defeat. And yet, still, some people are primarily worried about the possible infringement of his human rights.
I do love Britain's liberal tradition, but it hasn't half bred some soft idiots in its time.
(Talleyrand himself is a strange figure - a man who prized stability and good governance above all things, but had the misfortune to be born French. Had he lived in Britain, and been able to curb his taste for backhanders, he'd have done very well in the Civil Service**, and his name would now be forgotten. But living in France...he never managed to direct events half so much as he would like or even as much as this adoring biographer contends. Consider, this is a man who felt that among the things France most needed were a free press, the rule of law and lasting peace with England - and yet he ended up intimately involved with the Revolution, at the right hand of Napoleon, and in practice acted as precious little brake on either. And yet, for what little he did achieve, he has attained immortality - albeit by being remembered as a byword for duplicity, vanity and greed. Oh, and his legendary wit? Either it just doesn't translate, or it was rubbish in the first place and people only laughed like they do at any powerful man's jokes. Like Wilde in Stoppard's Invention of Love, he lives in history simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Suddenly, obscurity doesn't seem so bad. And if any of that seemed like patriotic chauvinism, I refer you to Talleyrand's own summary - "The English do everything better than we do". This in a letter to a countryman, mark you, not as part of his usual sycophancy)

*Cloaks are so great. I sometimes seriously suspect that as much as I want to set the world to rights, the primary appeal of superpowers is that they'd give me more excuses to wear a cloak.
**"They think I am immoral and Machiavellian, yet I am simply impassive and disdainful. I have never given perverse advice to a government or a prince, but I do not go down with them. After shipwrecks, you need pilots to rescue the shipwrecked. I stay calm and get them to port somewhere. No matter which port, as long as it offers shelter." - that could be Sir Humphrey in an unusually open moment, couldn't it?

Well, that was exciting! After a typically excellent set from Luxembourg I check out the voicemail that arrived during 'London Is Blue' and it's Feeling Gloomy insisting that Your Disco Needs You. Well, actually they need wilteddaffodil but they invite me too because it would look rude if they didn't. So we tear off to Angel where she spins the tunes while I make the occasional suggestion and deal with the people who have requests - almost all of which are for 'I Predict A Riot' or 'This Charming Man'. Because, hey, nobody's had enough chances to dance to them in the indie clubs of the nation, have they now?

I'm so glad that my fears about last night's Doctor Who were totally unfounded. The principle of retooling a (very good) book for TV seemed dubious, especially given the problems with Paul Cornell's last TV episode, but it all came right. The story was different enough to keep me guessing and to play to the medium, and there were some real classic old-series style moments with the scarecrows. Oh, and Jessica Stevenson! It was just lovely. Lovely. Especially the sketchbook page of the old Doctors.

Extremely distressing pangolin news. Obviously, the answer as far as I'm concerned is to replace nugatory fines for smuggling endangered species with summary execution.

Trent Reznor interview in an old Kerrang I found, from circa With Teeth where 'The Hand That Feeds' is "as close as Reznor feels he can get to a hectoring anti-Bush track, and one he admits "is very close to bashing people over the head with the message"." Well, unless his next album were to be a concept album extrapolating a nightmare future from the Bush administration's album, of course.

I'm doing a bit of DJing early on at Feeling Gloomy later, but please don't let that dissuade you from coming down to check out the newer, shinier Luxembourg and all the other attractions.

Peep Show just gets more painful every time, doesn't it? Meanwhile, I only tried watching Roman's Empire because I used to vaguely know the lead back in the midlands; as such, I was a little jarred to find one scene filmed on my London road, out front of Rowan's. It's not a *bad* programme, but nor does it quite seem to gel, even with a good supporting cast including Nathan Barley and Roy from The IT Crowd.
One comedy which definitely doesn't live up to its early promise: Mike Judge's Office Space. After starting off with ten painfully accurate minutes which are almost too The Office to be fun, the real laughs ensue: our hero is left under hypnosis with no guilt or inhibitions, and stops giving even the semblance of a toss at work. Yes!, you think, This Is The Stuff! But then, like far too many US comedies, it starts pandering to conventional sentiments. Having established, very sensibly, that *all* work is rubbish, it pulls back, falters, flakes out. The scheme to rip off the employers (who sorely deserve it) falls apart for no particular reason. Our Hero's hypnosis starts wearing off, again for no particular reason. Convention is restored, normality asserted, the status quo survives. What looked so promising a denunciation of all work ends with a cliched paean to the dignity of manual labour. It's a terrible, middlebrow waste of what started so anarchically well. It's like when Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead veers away from the hijinks which should ensue and instead forces the oldest kid to get a job. Oh well, perhaps I was a fool ever to hope for greatness from any film where Jennifer Blandiston is the unattainable object of desire.

White Mischief last night had enough that was splendid to do great credit to a first attempt. Evil Genius were their usual charmingly demonic selves, and Flipron filled the bigger space as effortlessly as they do the smaller venues in which I've seen them before. True, Tuesday Weld were rather let down by Stephen's voice and poise not being up to the usual standards (he may just have been ill), and I'm afraid Kunta Kinte are no Catch - the Laurel Collective do this sort of thing much better (though Toby still only looks about 16, so it's not as if he's got no time to pull it all back together). The vast majority of the crowd had made an impressive effort, and the space was almost right, but I fear Conway Hall just doesn't have the edge of darkness which would suit a night like this - nor does it help having a Polonius quote over the stage (silly humanists). The most astounding entertainment I've seen in quite some time, though, was The Great Voltini. Several wise men and women of this parish having concluded, some time ago, that the mark of a great pop video was fire and/or breasts - last night I saw a fire started with a breast. Is this where the young folk would say 'FTW'?