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A second trip to the Silver Bullet on Thursday to see Electricity In Our Homes, about whom I had heard good things. And I enjoyed them - it's not as if angular post-punk stylings are in short supply these days, but they do it well enough that I was thinking 'this is Joy Division if they weren't miserable'. I had been drinking, admittedly. And I loved that they played a short set, five songs or so, which when I first encounter a band live is about what I want. I imagine that for the established fans it's less good, but the ones I was with didn't seem to mind.
The Vichy Government, on the other hand, I know somewhat better, well enough to be excited when they bring 'Loneliest Man in Ancient Rome' out of mothballs, or mash up 'Death of a Mummy's Boy' with 'Iberia'. [livejournal.com profile] cappuccino_kid has a sore throat; Andrew says he sounds like Lee Hazlewood, at which I ask if that means Andrew is Nancy. He's under a red light against velvet curtains like an austerity era Bryan Ferry video, spitting bile with an even harsher tone than usual, when a young lady in massive false eyelashes and a corset enters. Her manner says hen party, not goth, and I instantly know no sale has been made. Indeed, I'm not sure the audience makes it past double figures, and some of that was the next band. They are called Monkey Chunk, and are worse than that sounds. The drum has a cannabis leaf stencilled on the side, the drummer's hat is even more offensive, and two of them have ignored Tropic Thunder's advice and gone full retard. The standing-up cello freakouts at least mean that they are uniquely bad, but this is the best that can be said for them. And finally, Jonny Cola & the A-Grades, who have had an emergency rhythm section substitution which, alongside the reappearance of 'Disappearing Act', has made them a considerably better band. Clearly the previous A-Grades were in fact B Pluses at best. The bum cleavage issue does need to be addressed, though.
I don't stay for much of the club; some good goth tracks are getting aired, but I'm feeling too hibernatory, and need to be up in time to swap books on Sunday. I came away with a good haul, reminded of the happy days of the freebox.

Beyond going out, it was a bit of a Fifth Doctor weekend, and I don't just mean that I'm left with a nagging sense that it could have gone better, though his faint ineptitude was very much on display in The Haunting of Thomas Brewster, where a Victorian urchin nicks the TARDIS. And then, Warriors of the Deep, which I assumed couldn't be as bad as its reputation. How wrong I was. I was under the impression that it was a good story, badly realised, but it's not even that. Yes, the (now inexplicably self-described) Silurians and Sea Devils look dreadful, and their pet monster the Myrka (seen here in its baffling confrontation with Ingrid Pitt) is worse. But beyond and beneath all that tat, the plot is already a series of nonsenses. The Doctor tries to buy time and prove he's not a saboteur, by sabotaging the Seabase's reactor! The Doctor's head has barely gone underwater before Turlough convinces Tegan he's drowned! Nobody seems to have mastered the basics of 'holding someone prisoner'! All one can say in its favour is that the last minute is powerful stuff - and by that point, any viewer will heartily agree with the Doctor that "There should have been another way".

"Every two years [the United Nations] draws up and passes a resolution calling for states to eliminate extra-judicial killings motivated by race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, language or other identifying characteristics.
In the past, sexual orientation has been on that list. This year, the phrase was dropped. An amendment to that effect was passed by 79 votes to 70. It was proposed by Benin, the chair of the African group of nations, supported by Morocco on behalf of the Islamic conference."

Good old international law, eh?
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I note that there was again a new moon on Monday, but what with the torrential rain, I completely missed it. Sorry, Duran Duran.

Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire by Iain Sinclair )
And what are the odds on reading two books in a row where a minor character is trying a Pierre Menard-style rewrite of works by Joseph Conrad?

Got stuck into some free DVDs from the old regime last night. I'm sure I caught some as a child, but only on Monday night did I sit down to watch Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. Everyone says the performance is pretty much definitive, and I'm not going to argue - cadaverous, inhuman, brilliant - but here's what intrigues me: having messed up and thought Casebook was the first series, I started there, with 'The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax' in which Holmes has a bit of an off day. More of an off day, in fact, than in the original story, and it gets to him more. The first episode of the first series was in fact 'A Scandal in Bohemia'. Now, simply because of the name and the brevity this was the first of the original stories which I read, but it is deeply unusual in that Holmes has a seriously off day. ITV was, in those days, still capable of producing decent dramas, but is this a precursor of the nasty tendency now to need to 'humanise' your leads right from the start? Which is not just an ITV thing - consider how the very first House saw him break his resolution never to speak to the patients (one reason I abandoned that show so promptly - others include hypochondria, and Hugh Laurie's accent).
Nonetheless, considerably truer to Doyle's writings than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, which I also attempted, where a bunch of Australians and Yanks plus one token bumbling Brit get trapped on a plateau with dinosaurs who really make you realise how far CGI has come in the past decade, plus all manner of other nonsense - the first episode has lascivious Roman-style lizardmen who would have been right at home in Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E Howard, but are really not Doyle's kind of thing. Passably entertaining nonsense which is itself demonstrably superior to the sappy, try-hard gloop that is Kyle XY, one of the worst SF series of which I have ever had the misfortune to see five minutes. And to put that into context, I managed a whole episode of Merlin. If anyone wants the first season DVD of Kyle XY, it's yours, though I will judge you for that.

Theory: anyone who has seen or indeed owned a lava lamp would be significantly less disturbed by the bubbling chaos of Azathoth, Nyogha and their ilk than people of Lovecraft's generation.

Free Stuff

Jul. 20th, 2008 09:55 pm
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If you like science fiction or fantasy, or just fancy having a ton of ebooks to hand in case of boredom (I still favour the pocket paperback myself, but many of you have more advanced personal electronics than I do), then make sure to hit the relaunched Tor.com sometime this week for freebies galore. Perversely, there are no blurbs to guide you towards the ones you might like, so browsing with amazon.com open in another window might be wise. The only one I've thus far read, and as such can recommend, is John Scalzi's Old Man's War, a Heinlein-influenced future war yarn. For an even quicker sampler of what you can expect from Scalzi, check out his essay 'I Hate Your Politics' (whatever they are).

Yesterday I went to Dagenham, Green Lanes and a building site, drinking. Today I was turfed off a bus in Peckham. If you go with the Broken Society hysteria, then that pretty much qualifies me as a war veteran, but I escaped each of these lands of fear without the least mishap or hairy moment. Whereas last night, in my own home, going to brush my teeth like a good boy, I managed to cut my finger and have it bleed so much that, to quote one flatmate, "I thought someone had been slaughtered in the bathroom".

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