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

My worry reflex keeps trying to creep up on me at the moment, and I have to batter it down with reminders that life is pretty good right now. This weekend, for instance - found a new pub for weekends which I'm not even mentioning online in case Neil Morrissey is watching. Went to Don't Stop Moving where as well as all the pop you could want, These Animal Me's 'Speeed King' got an airing. And then yesterday...well, apparently that was the heaviest snow for 18 years. Certainly it was my best snow day since about then, the only contender being the time at school where it was the rest of us stick the sixth form in all-out snowball war around the whole grounds. We made a snowmonkey! With breasts! Who went to heaven! And then a snow Caesar! And I was totally the most dangerous snowballer, because I have the biggest hands! Happy times. Glorious times.

More handy reminders that the BBC isn't *just* for winding up tabloids and the scum who read them in the shape of The Old Guys and Moses Jones. The former I watched because it was conceived by Peep Show's Bain & Armstrong, and I was put off when the credits revealed that it wasn't actually written by them - was the writer their Chibnall equivalent? Nor did the laugh track augur well. But while it's undoubtedly a broader style of comedy than Peep Show - cf the lead roles going to Trigger and the guy from Keeping Up Appearances, with Jane Asher as the neighbour and Jen from The IT Crowd as the daughter - it's still a recognisable relative, wallowing in toxic male companionship and hilariously awkward moments. Moses Jones is a cop show which, let's be honest, I'm mainly watching because the Eleventh Doctor is the sidekick. Worryingly, so far he really hasn't done much. But Shaun Parkes is excellent as ever in the lead role, while the supporting cast for their journey into crime and ritual sacrifice in London's Ugandan community includes Kareem Said from Oz, Suzie Torchwood and a bunch of very good African actors I don't recognise. I'm finding it all distinctly reminiscent of The Vinyl Underground but a) it's still pretty good and b) frankly, not many people will experience this problem.

Recent dreams:
- In a manner reminiscent of Movember, loads of my friends were growing Hitler 'taches to mark his birthday. This was intended ironically, or as reclamation, or something, but it still felt like poor taste to me. Everyone else just thought I was being a spoilsport.
- Superman was our mate, and I went for a drink with him at the Salisbury because he was feeling a bit listless after the events of Final Crisis.

I'm surprised more hasn't been made of Mick Harvey leaving the Bad Seeds. Mick's been working with Nick since The Boys Next Door, and I've always wondered how much of what we think of as Cave is in fact Harvey, particularly when listening to Harvey's other projects. I suppose now we get to find out.

Final Crisis: Superman Beyond's second issue confirms that this is the comic Final Crisis should have been. Yes, Grant Morrison is reusing his old tropes again - breaking the fourth wall, Limbo, the self-evolving hyperstory, creators trapped in creation - but here there's a manic, fizzing joy and ingenuity I'm not getting from the parent Rock of Ages reprise. Some great 3D sequences, too - though should you happen, as I did, to look out of the window with your glasses still on, it brings a real moment of Crisis terror - RED SKIES!
Elsewhere in comics, Bendis' Dark Avengers may not have any lines to equal the best of Warren Ellis' Thunderbolts run, but in so far as it's taking that series' concept - Marvel's biggest bastards given the keys to the kingdom - to the next level, I'm very much interested. Thunderbolts, meanwhile, has gone deeper and darker under Andy Diggle, and this issue includes a considerably more substantial Barack Obama appearance than that meaningless fluff-piece of a Spider-Man back-up strip, albeit to considerably less fanfare.

Have been left with a nagging sensation that I've not used my leisure to best advantage this week, to the extent that I started getting quite angry with myself/the world and had to go wander the British Museum for a while to calm down. Silly, really - even aside from the nebulous business of Seeing Nice People, I've watched another Losey/Pinter/Bogarde masterpiece, Accident; seen the Soft Close-Ups and Mr Solo; and made a reasonably good start on Ulysses, so it's not as if I'm flicking myself off to Trisha just yet.

I know list articles are intrinsically pointless, and I know they're designed to provoke quibbling, so I'm not going to get up in arms about the omissions from the Guardian's Novels You Must Read, or the times where they've chosen a book which isn't the author's best. And I should be glad, I suppose, that one of the seven sections was science fiction and fantasy. But since when was Kavalier & Clay, The Man Who Was Thursday or The Wasp Factory science fiction or fantasy? They may not be dull enough to be literary fiction, but none of them takes place in a world that is not the consensus version of this one - except in so far as they are not true. If we say that the fictional comics in Chabon's book make it an alternate world, then so does the fictional MP in The Line of Beauty, and down that line every book bar the most tiresomely domestic becomes SF. Which would amuse me at least a little, it's true, but is patently nonsense.

Why do people scurry? I've been noticing it a lot in these cold, foggy nights - people see me looming out of the haze, and they start scurrying - hunch shoulders, head down, pace uneasily quickened. Scurrying never helped anyone. I mean, I used to work with a guy who did it really badly, even in the office in the daytime, and even though I quite liked him and have never done anything of the sort in my life, I still had to clamp down on an atavistic reflex which wanted to mug him. And this guy was forever getting mugged, assaulted and what-have-you, to a degree which would be baffling if it weren't for the way he walked. Seriously, if you want to take evasive action - cross the road, speed up, whatever - then fine. In many circumstances, it might be the sensible thing to do. But for heavens' sake, do it with your head held high and your spine straight, because the minute you start scurrying, you look like prey. And if whoever's looming out of the fog is a predator, they will notice that, and you will have become one more contributor to the ranks of self-fulfilling prophecies.
(And not that I should have to say this, but this verges on certain sensitive issues so for the sake of clarity - no, this is not to even remotely absolve the predators and no, this is not to say that walking (apparently) unafraid is an entirely infallible strategy for avoiding harm. But it does work a lot better than scurrying)

Over-rated Fables scribe Bill Willingham has written a piece opposing grim'n'gritty 'superhero decadence', and arguing that ' the superhero genre should be “different, better, with higher standards, loftier ideals and a more virtuous — more American — point of view.”' Cue applauding comments from the sort of charmers who object to foreigners and non-white superheroes, or have plain creepy thoughts about Lois Lane, which for all Willingham's noted right-wing politics, is possibly not quite what he was getting at. More to the point, just as this C-lister is claiming that his own Elementals was one of the comics which kicked off the darker trend - a claim I've never seen from anyone but him - he's now acting as though he's the first to object to the trend, a trend he presents as still at its height through highly selective quoting of recent comics and films. Alan Moore - who alongside Frank Miller and maybe Howard Chaykin, *actually* started grim and gritty - has been saying for years that it got silly, that comics have had enough solve and now need a little coagula (or as the less alchemical* might put it, enough deconstruction and now need some reconstruction). Grant Morrison has been arguing something similar since at least Flex Mentallo, whose final issue was meant to be taking us past the Dark Age and into the Neon Age; you could argue that Final Crisis shows a funny way of going about this agenda, but All Star Superman was as purestrain heroic as the Superman comics Willingham seems to want, even if it was perhaps a little lacking in USA! USA! jingoism for his tastes.

*Speaking of alchemy, I never mentioned anything about Foucault's Pendulum on here, did I? From now on, I'm going to tell every conspiracy theorist I meet to read that book before they try it on with their controlled-demolition-of-Twin-Towers crap. Because even if it doesn't convince them - and part of the dark beauty of a real conspiracy mindset is, nothing will - then 650 pages should buy me a fair period of peace.

Granted, the last few times we were in the Noble we moaned, only partly in jest, that there were people drinking there, sitting in our seats, and generally lowering the tone. But if nothing else, shouldn't they have secured its future, meant it wouldn't have to be up for sale again, leave it in a position where one person's illness doesn't force us to resort to a nearby 'pub' no longer even fit to be named in this journal lest by doing so I pollute the servers and screens?
That's the thing about dark times - they're dark on every level. You can do your best to ignore the geopolitics, and heavens know it's tempting, but then you find your local's deserted you, your supermarket's discontinued your favourites, your shoelaces just won't stay tied. Once the entropy takes hold, it's as above, so below.
And then, of course, there's a reversal of fortunes in the war in heaven. And suddenly you see a pug acting the fool and a terrier with the yawns, and the moon's impossibly big and watching over Stoke Newington, and the setting sun lights the clouds behind the Gothic revival water tower like Camelot never fell.

I've finally finished a manga! Libraries have a nasty habit of getting enough volumes to hook me, and then never buying the rest - or in the case of Koike & Kojima books going one worse and, as sadistic as the stories, getting in the first couple - and then a random smattering of later volumes, just to tempt me. But well done Westminster, for completing their Death Note collection, even getting in the fairly superfluous companion and offcuts collection How to Read. Even leaving that aside, I can't deny there's some fat could be trimmed from the 12 volumes of the story proper, and that it never entirely gets to grip with the questions its central premise raises (vigilante killings of criminals by means of a magic notebook - I'm in favour, myself, but there's an emotional weight to the question which never quite makes the page). It does, however, manage some real moments of shock as it twists and turns, and one of those curious little tropes I always love is the ridiculously convoluted fight scene between incredibly smart antagonists, each of them revealing that they've anticipated the other's anticipation of their anticipation of...and so on. Consider the Seventh Doctor at his most Machiavellian, or Vandal Savage versus Resurrection Man in DC One Million, or Iron Man versus Black Panther in Enemy of the State II. Consider even, as comic incarnation of the type, the time-travelling fight scene in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey - Death Note is fit to stand among them.

Meanwhile in Western comics vigilante news, Garth Ennis' epic Punisher run has concluded. Now there's a comic prepared to address its moral issues, albeit one which never collapses into the pathetic hand-wringing which has often haunted the series when other writers were doing it wrong. The problem was that the Punisher - who is sensible, and shoots criminals in the head - was co-existing with allegedly more admirable heroes who beat criminals up, and then leave them alive to escape from gaol and kill again once another writer wants to use the same villain. By shifting him ever so slightly out of that context, Ennis could cut loose - without going too far the other way and turning it into a puerile celebration of violence for violence's sake. There's a very good scene in Warren Ellis' new issue of Astonishing X-Men in which Cyclops takes a similar clear-sighted line on how, in the superhero's line of work, sometimes killing is the only sensible thing to do. Contrast this with this week's editions of Secret Invasion and Captain Britain - they're both good comics, but in both heroes who normally make a big deal of the Heroic Code and how they Never Kill show no compunction whatsoever about killing invading Skrulls. So implicitly, even the life of an intractably evil human is sacrosanct, but those green alien mofos? Waste 'em. Leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, doesn't it?
Startlingly, DC also managed to put out a good comic this week - Grant Morrison's latest Batman RIP reassures me that, the evidence of Final Crisis aside, he hasn't been totally subsumed by Levitzseid's Anti-Fun Equation just yet.