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

Didn't quite do anything proper for Hallowe'en or November 5th this year, though there was some dressing up and you can hardly fail to see some fireworks over what's now more like Guy Fawkes' Fortnight (Guy Fawtesnight?) - that's the problem with festival creep, where you can't even quite fix on one of the adjacent weekends as the consensus alternative. Dear world, please stop getting festivals wrong, ta.

Accidentally let my Netflix subscription run over after Breaking Bad was done, but regardless of how the US version has a lot more stuff* there was still plenty I'd been vaguely meaning to watch on the UK site. The Friends of Eddie Coyle, for instance, with Robert Mitchum exuding the shabby grandeur of a moth-eaten lion, or the gloriously absurd and none-more-eighties Lifeforce, in which a mission to Halley's Comet unwittingly unleashes a zombie plague (complete with Prefab Sprout posters visible in the background as they devastate London). The most notable casting is probably Patrick Stewart, who (SPOILERS) gets possessed by the sexy naked lady space vampire and so proceeds to do some gaying up (although it's shot in a way which would probably disappoing anyone going into the film just for that). Seven Psychopaths is the thoroughly meta and possibly even better follow-up to the delightful In Bruges, and more meta still is A Film With Me In It, which manages a surprising amount of bloodshed for something starring Dylan Moran. The Cabin In The Woods, on the other hand, I'd dismissed as a slasher movie with a twist (and Whedon dialogue), until I heard one recommendation too many to ignore. First surprise: the twist isn't, it's there from the start. And what that enables, and what lies behind it - that's utterly ingenious. Add me to the list of recommendations. Which is not something I can really say about Don Johnson in Harlan Ellison adaptation A Boy and his Dog; post-apocalyptic black comedy it may be, but I found the whole thing just a little too queasy, and not always in a manner that seemed intentional.

Watched elsewere:
Ian Hislop's dramatisation of the story of trench samizdat The Wipers Times. As with Blackadder, the horror of the Great War always hits hardest for me when it's presented with the gallows humour of the Tommies intact.
Doctor Who: The Web of Fear - a story which, this time last year, I would never have expected to see in my lifetime. And it stands up a lot better than most classic Who that runs past four episodes, helped by the claustrophobic, iconic location - running down a corridor feels so much more satisfying when that corridor is part of an identifiable tube station. Victoria is still a dreadful companion, mind.
Idiotic horror White Noise: The Light, which xandratheblue and I watched on the simple grounds that Katee Sackhoff and Nathan Fillion would be suitable casting to play us in any film of our incredibly exciting lives. Sadly, it turned out to be a bad Final Destination riff - but with more dodgy theology! And nonsensical numerology! And lots of RUNNING REALLY FAST.
Repo Man, which remains as profoundly peculiar and entertaining as ever (and I can't believe it never gets mentioned as an influence on Lebowski). The Blu-ray extras are deeply rum, and include Harry Dean Stanton talking about life for 15 minutes before singing 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat', and Alex Cox showing the deleted scenes to the real-life inventor of the neutron bomb.

And on the big screen - Thor: The Dark World. Certainly not the best of the Marvel films, but I find it oddly reassuring that they can stumble now without falling flat on their faces, and still produce a fairly entertaining picture which will fill up a cinema with casual viewers (you can tell them from the geek hardcore so easily, because they're the ones who don't even stay for the first credits scene, let alone the very end). Also, pleasing show of public right-mindedness in the way that everyone in the auditorium, regardless of class or race, agreed that the family with a screaming baby should take it the fuck out of the cinema - and rather than grumbling passive-aggressively, fetched ushers to enforce that verdict. See! Superhero films encourage viewers to take more responsibility for making the world a better place.

*Such as Bob's Burgers, which I saw round the house of a friend who's hacked the relevant bits of science to watch the US menu. Like its fellow H Jon Benjamin animation Archer, this is allegedly on Freeview channels, but gets thrown away in graveyard slots. Baffling, given how funny both are at their best. NB: do not look for H Jon Benjamin's face online; you'd expect him to be less attractive than Sterling Archer, but I think he may even be less attractive than Bob.

Local venues the Archway Tavern and Nambucca have both had refits, but the latter is still the same bloody shambles it always was, with the same misguided belief that this is somehow endearingly rock'n'roll. The Archway's transition to some kind of weird nineties theme bar, on the other hand...well, at least the theme seems to extend to what now constitutes a cheap pint, but in the nineties would still have been a nightmarish three quid. The bands at both were led by Davids, and more an exercise in larking about than anything else; both were a great deal of fun. The supports at both were bloody embarrassments. And both were Hallowe'en events, of course*. Normally I'm adamant about celebrating the great festivals on the actual day...but it's Monday today. Even the restless dead don't rise with any enthusiasm on a Monday.

Speaking of the dead rising - I finally read DC's zombie superhero epic Blackest Night. Which, to my utter lack of surprise, has all of writer Geoff Johns' usual sins - including that unseemly tendency to get all metatextual about how comics used to be so bright and innocent, and why can't they be like that still, while taking a sordid delight in demonstrating the gruesomeness of the modern by repeated graphic dismebowelments &c. He wants to eat his tasty braaaaains cake and still have it, really. In total, Blackest Night sprawls across seven collected editions of tie-ins (for no real reason beyond perversity, I read the core series last). The Exterminators, on the other hand, covers a mere five books. One of the many comics from Vertigo (aka 'the HBO of comics') to be cancelled before it reached its proposed destination, this was a planned 50-issue series which only made it to 30. Largely because, as writer Simon Oliver acknowledges in a rueful foreword to the final collection, it's about bugs, and so at least a quarter of the potential audience would be too revolted to read it. And it is, make no mistake, a revolting series. But also, for all its fantastical elements, one which feels like it's saying something interesting about humanity, and nature, and the poor schmucks who have to hold the line between the two. Whereas Blackest Night, for all that it manages some lovely tricks with colour, really doesn't have much more to say than 'Dude, if Hawkman was a zombie he'd be even more badass!' Which is not only fairly hollow - it turns out it isn't even true.

*Though unlike Christmas creep, Hallowe'en crawl has some limits. On Friday, even in Camden, there was little sign of sexy cats &c. Or at least, not specifically Hallowe'eny ones. The alleged retirement show of Steven Horry, Frontman, with support from Rebekah Delgado and Aurora, was many things, but spooky was not among them.

Sometimes we all get anxious - if time is money then it explains how time and money can get wrapped into a sort of unified field theory of worry which then starts pulling in everything else, however outlandish. And London, being not half so stony-hearted as some have made her out to be, tries her best to cheer you up, pulling aside the curtain so you catch sight of side-streets you've never seen before in all the times you've gone down that road, but you're so convinced that you're in a hurry that you mark them for future investigation, so she makes them more and more enticing until finally you crack and trot down there and suddenly, even though it looks like a normal enough little street, the light and the birdsong and the breeze all come together and counteract that knot of troubles and everything's alright again. And you carry on along your way, lighter of spirit, and accomplish your missions and find time to drop in on the British Museum too, where while looking for something else entirely you find a statue of the Remover of Obstacles which contains at least enough of his essence to convey the appropriate sentiment of "Hey, we got this! Relax." And you know that something will turn up - it always does.

Went for another walk later on, to take in the fireworks - and I've no idea what most modern Britons are celebrating these days, whether it's an expression of anarchist tendencies which I can hardly begrudge even if they have chosen an iffy figurehead, or if they just like blowing sh1t up. Personally, commemorating the defeat and brutal execution of the seventeenth century's answer to al Qaeda still works for me, but whatever it's nominally about, the lights, and the bangs, and the smell of gunpowder in the air..it's magical in itself. And this year there was no magic in the air on Hallowe'en, in spite of all the witches and vampires on the streets, but it's stupid to be purist about these things, for the nature of the magical is not to be constrained by formulae - if it were just another science then what would be the point?

In spite of not having to fit myself around a working day at present, I still find myself fitting more or less to a standard diurnal schedule - most of the time. Last night was one of the exceptions, charging drunkenly around Youtube looking for gems I half-remembered or never caught, like this Whipping Boy video, and making the sad discovery that 'Stranger Than Fiction' by Destroy All Monsters is not half so good as I remember. I also watched '£45 zombie movie' Colin; obviously the same thing that made me keen to see it (zombie Al!) is the thing which most hampers my suspension of disbelief, but even so it has some haunting moments. I worry, though, that telling the story from the zombie's point of view, making the zombie-killers such unsympathetic characters, will be very counterproductive come the zombie apocalypse.

Other items of interest:
- Grant Morrison and Stephen Fry are pitching something for BBC Scotland.
- A rather entertaining drubbing of Florence & the Machine.
- "Presenter Lauren Laverne has signed up to write a series of novels for teenage girls." Anyone else remember when that news would have been terribly exciting?

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?