alexsarll | Entries tagged with hbo

The headline would have to come out of order, and that's my stand-up/lecture/thing at Bright Club on Tuesday, which seemed to go down pretty well. I'm sort of tempted to put the text on here, because I can't see when I'm ever likely to need to give another comedic talk about Emperor Frederick II, but you never know...

Otherwise:
- Paul Gravett giving a talk at the library about graphic novels, and slightly fluffing it. The guy is very smart, and engaging, and he knows his stuff, but he pitched this wrong. Too much of it was miserable autobiographical project after miserable autobiographical project and yes, that's exactly the way to get a reading group or broadsheet literary critic on board, but not this audience who were already reading comics. It's not the way to get the general public interested, either. Even if you don't want to talk about superheroes (and I can respect that, if only as entryism) then talk about Scott Pilgrim, Shaun Tan, The Walking Dead, the renaissance in crime comics, Bryan Talbot. Talk about the real variety in comics, not just the various settings from which people can extrude navel-gazing yawnfests.
- Runebound, which like Talisman takes place at the exact point where board games start to become simple roleplaying games. Yes, I am a geek, what of it?
- Spending more than an hour in the Camden World's End for the first time ever, and feeling very old, but strangely at home. I love that London, with all its infinitely diversified tribes, can still have somewhere that feels like The Indie Pub in a provincial town.
-

thedavidx's Guided Missile special, with the birthday boy covering Adam Ant songs, and the Deptford Beach Babes, and Dave Barbarossa's new band (nice drumming, shame about everything else), and Black Daniel whom I still don't quite get even though I was in the mood for them this time. Plus, the return of the 18 Carat Love Affair! Now a slightly looser, rockier proposition, a little less eighties. Not a transition of which I have often approved, but it suits them.
- Realising that not only had I finally, definitely found De Beauvoir Town, but I was drinking in it. Then going home to be disappointed by Boardwalk Empire, which I will still doubtless finish sooner or later, but which I am no longer cursing Murdoch for nabbing. Not to worry, there are still plenty of other things for which to curse him.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Damn These Vampires - The Mountain Goats

I thought my policy of always giving a new HBO show a chance might have hit its limits with Hung. Especially since it's on More4 on Thursday nights, at an end of the week already overloaded with Sarah Jane Adventures, Wednesday night's HBO double-bill, Friday's comedy options...but much to my surprise, the first episode at least was excellent. The trailers have been going about it all wrong, emphasising the comedy/prurient angle we've all seen before. Whereas the show itself...in much the same way as The Wire used police and drug gangs as a way to examine the decline of the American city, or Deadwood looked at the birth of the nation by way of a psychopathic publican, Hung examines the squeezing of the middle class through the example of a hard-up history teacher with a really big cock. It's more about the way everything seems to be falling apart, and the sense that our working life is not working out like we were given to expect, than Thomas Jane's endowment.

Wednesday night:

augstone brings

billetdoux along on a mini-US deputation to the Noble, establishing that even if Obama has more sense than to be seen with Gordon Brown, the special relationship is alive and well at the level of indie pubbing. Thursday: a Brontosaurus Chorus show, the first I've seen since

icecoldinalex joined and the first time I've really heard the song for which I spent two days filming - Johnny and I have to resist the urge to re-enact the video on stage. The gig's in a weird little basement venue on Denmark Street called Peter Parker's; there's no Spider-Man iconography that I can see, but the cocktail 'Peter Parker's Cvm Shot' still makes me think 'thwip!'. The support are a noise duo whose name is never announced (my own guess: Sine Cosine Tangent); they're playing in front of a projection of Akira, the subtitles on which provide a perfect excuse to stare at the girl's fairly impressive cleavage. All told, I probably had enough material for a post on Friday, but I had to dash off to catch Seizure (ignore all the pretentious guff in the leaflet, the key details of this art project are that it is very blue and very shiny and quite magical). However, this is probably for the best as it means I can gently draw a veil over the weekend.

I keep hearing good things about the comics of Matt Fraction, so I keep picking them up when the library has them, and I'm still not convinced that he's anything but Warren Ellis's even more try-hard younger brother. All his characters sound the same: "Let's make out and whip up more plans for mass slaughter", cackles the villain. Whereas Iron Man himself gloats "Your tax dollars pay me to beat the Hell out of people like this. (I decline the paycheck, by the way)". Which is identical in tone, and also completely meaningless - he just came up with a line he liked and deployed it even though it required a caveat that then made no sense. The only way I could persevere was by pairing it with the disappointing Micro Men on BBC4, there being a strange congruence of themes. "My biggest nightmare has come true...Iron Man 2.0 is here...and I'm not the one that made it" - the cheap, easy to use and ultimately disposable new technology as plot driver, all made me start identifying Clive Sinclair as a British comedy version of Tony Stark. I don't know what that says about anything but it says more than Fraction's Iron Man.
(Also read something where he at least tried to ditch the tech fetish and the KEWL! - Secret Invasion: Thor. And that was just horribly characterless, in spite of featuring Beta Ray Bill, so maybe the usual mode is the lesser evil for him. The failure of this one was thrown into particular relief by how funny and characterful and cosmic and generally *fun* Secret Invasion: Hercules could make a story starting from a fairly similar premise)

*Although having made derogatory mention of Ellis, it's only fair I acknowledge that the final issue of Planetary was beautiful - the first comic since the end of Captain Britain to leave me both crying and laughing in public. Even if that doesn't explain why it was so ridiculously late. Or why newuniversal is. Or Doktor Sleepless.

Current Mood: Wildcats!
Current Music: It Couldn't Happen Here - Pet Shop Boys

Couple of BBC radio shows of possible interest: a documentary on Banshees and Magazine guitarist John McGeogh, with contributors including Howard Devoto and, as of tomorrow, one about the mighty HBO, with Stroud Green Road habitue Aidan Gillen taking part. I should also have mentioned the Paul Morley programme about celebrity culture, but forgot after the first part, and the second wasn't nearly as interesting.

It's worth seeing Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum in David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow simply because it's a script that gives two great character actors a lot of opportunities to have a whale of a time shouting good lines at each other. But that's not necessarily to say it's a good play. Mamet is much better at writing men with men than women, so in the second act, when it's Goldblum and Laura Michelle Kelly, everything sags rather. I don't know her - apparently she's mostly done musicals - and I wouldn't say she's a bad actress, but she doesn't grab the attention like Spacey and Goldblum do - though with the material Mamet gives her, can she really be held to blame? If you want to consider this play as a story, not a vehicle, I think it's fundamentally flawed.
Summary of plot:
Spacey wants Goldblum to make a prison blockbuster starring a hot property actor. But should Goldblum instead make a film of apocalyptic Great American Novel The Bridge?
Flaws in plot:
- The Bridge is rubbish. We hear plenty of excerpts, and I'm not sure whether Mamet has deliberately written it as a parody of the sort of impenetrable toss which a certain type of critic loves, but that's what it is.
- Apparently the problem with filming The Bridge is that it's about the end of the world, and Hollywood doesn't like films about the end of the world. Is this play set in some bizarre parallel universe, or just incredibly dated? If the latter, what period would that be? Because I am hard pressed to think of any long period without a big doomsday film. If anything, The Bridge sounds like a rubbish version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the big-budget film of which is already in development.
- Goldblum has just been promoted - he's about to make his first film as co-producer. At no stage does anyone suggest hey, let's do the prison blockbuster and *then* make The Bridge! Even though the blockbuster already has a script, while The Bridge would need rights bought, an adaptation commissioned...a delay, in other words, during which Goldblum can easily cement his position with the more commercial film.
Nonsense, in other words, but entertaining nonsense. Much like the power ballads night I attended afterwards at the new Monarch, which used to be the Misty Moon and before that the Chalk Farm Road Wetherspoon's, and as such shouldn't work at all as a venue, but sort of does.

I can't imagine why Woolworths could ever find its market position threatened when it's selling such well-conceived items as the Lolita bed for young girls. Which reminds me rather of Alan Moore's comment re: Lost Girls that "It's a stick and a carrot combined, that for the purposes of commerce it can flood your mind with the most licentious ideas and imagery but woe betide anybody who actually finds themselves in this inflamed state and responds. Because then they are a dirty, filthy person who responds to p0rnography", and makes me want to write something about Lost Girls, which I started reading during its abortive serialisation 13 years ago and eventually got to finish a couple of weeks back, on what happened to be the night before the More4 broadcast of Chris Langham's apologia. The problem is, I'd still feel fundamentally uneasy because I would be blogging about p0rn, an unease only emphasised by how many words I'd have to deliberately mis-spell to avoid blocking the friendslist of those people who read LJ in monitored workplaces. We're none of us quite free, are we?

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Crazy Chick - Charlotte Church

People who've yet to see The Wire - are you sick of those who have going on about it? The first episode is legitimately streaming here 'til the end of the week, so you can so easily find out what the fuss is about. Yes, it's about drug dealers, and the first one is free. Anyway, that'll give you some idea of quite why everyone gets so excited about the show, but I've just finished the third season, and dear heavens it gets even better - and, hard as it may be to believe, even more bleak. There are glimmers of light, hope and humanity, for sure - but overall, and especially coming straight from the Potter and Rome conclusions, I feel bloody desolate. If Jacqui Smith really wants new ideas on reducing the harm caused by drugs, she could really not do better than watching these first three series.

Staying with the theme of social collapse, AK47: The Story Of The People's Gun is a deeply frustrating book. Michael Hodges has clearly done his research - meeting General Kalashnikov (and visiting the brothel in the original manufacturing plant), getting shot at in Iraq, interviewing former child soldiers - but fundamentally, he's written articles for Esquire and it shows. He has the glimmerings of a theme - the AK as brand, as revolutionary totem, as a devil which poisons every culture it touches - but he's never quite able to bring them into the light. But just as anyone with an AK is a killing machine (Mikhail Kalashnikov went a lot further than Sam Colt towards making man equal), anyone writing about the AK can terrify you. Reading about the state of Kalashnikov cultures, I found myself looking up and down the Tube thinking, dear heavens, imagine London's nutters and monsters equipped with these. And then the next chapter tells me that in the late nineties there was at least one AK47 in Finsbury Park mosque and it has never been recovered.

Copyright term on sound recordings to remain 50 years because "extending the term could harm Britain's trade balance and provide little practical benefit to artists while hampering creativity and consumers"; ageing musos and industry plutocrats predictably throw toys out of pram.

Current Mood: content
Current Music: Drowning Nightmare 1 - Swimmer One

Welcome to Lockdown London, where anyone who lives on the Victoria line is now being put to bed at a nice early hour on schoolnights. Supposedly it's so the line can be upgraded - and heavens know it needs an upgrade even to reach 'basic functionality', across Friday and Monday it was out on three of the four occasions when I needed it - but as with the smoking ban, it does rather fit the Spirit of the Age, in which our new PM feels obliged to make deeply unconvincing denials of his puritan tendencies while he initiates what looks like a surreptitious War On Fun. Fortunately, Finsbury Park offered local comedy for local people in a local living room, as Carey Marx tested out his Edinburgh show. The problem being, he was testing it on Us Lot, so obviously the material about rape, disability and mistaking babies for poos was going to get all the biggest laughs. Meaning we've sent him off to Edinburgh concentrating on all the material which, to an audience of tender sensibilities, is most likely to get him lynched, and there's a limit to how far even Parsnip the Teddy can defuse matters. Although - that in itself would be fairly amusing.

Like Harry Potter, like its own Mark Antony, Rome made a good end. OK, I'm sad that it was cancelled - and unsure how different the second season would have been were it not - but this was a season end which followed naturally (and as faithfully to history as the series ever was) from what had gone before, and out of which nothing naturally follows. Where would we have gone, after the grand wars of the Republic's fall - into the comparatively petty manoeuvrings by which Augustus cemented his position? Or skipping to the period already handled so marvellously by I, Claudius? They had enough problems working around Shakespeare, giving us a secret history of those events - I,C already was a secret history, so you'd lose that space. No, better to end it here, after two seasons of spite and shagging and swordplay, with the giants dead and the monster enthroned.

Further thought on Deathly Hallows: we never found out what happened to ( minor spoiler )
Oh, and I know pointing and laughing at imbeciles on comments pages is a bit fish/barrel, but I couldn't resist this particular peon, denouncing Potter and declaiming grandly about Literacy and Art while demonstrating a spectacular inability to spell or structure a sentence. Part of me suspects he must be a spoof.
(The Earthsea snobs, by the way, are beginning to get even more shaming for their source than the loopier elements of Potter fandom. But then, le Guin lacks Rowling's personal dignity, so what can one expect of the followers?)

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Wedding Bells/Let's Turn Back The Years - John Prine & Lucinda Williams

The pub downstairs seem to think that early Saturday morning is a good time to do noisy things with barrels. I can't agree, but I do feel more or less rested, and it meant I got to see a rather promising augury - a magpie (one for sorrow, plus I hate the songbird-murdering scum anyway) being chased around and beaten up by one of my favourite birds, the crow.

As much as I'm never going to turn down a free Jeays and Project Adorno show, or the free booze thereat, I can't help but feel a little guilty that, said show being in a library, the funding for that is presumably coming from the libraries budget, which pretty much by definition these days won't have enough to spend on books anyway. Hmmm. Still, good shows (Jeays unveiled one new song which, to me at least, sounded a bit Justin Timberlake) and the third act was Pog, aka the Stapletons' drummer, who had a sort of poppier Another Sunny Day thing going on.

You stand against HBO - you're the bad guy. It really is that simple.

HP Lovecraft - THE CABARET. "I made my mind up back in Arkham, when I go...I'm going to have my soul turned inside out by nameless horrors from beyond space and time."

Current Mood: content
Current Music: 5 Million Ways To Kill A CEO - The Coup

As it nears the end of its first series, Skins is moving increasingly from its pleasing teen fluff beginning to a land of dark neon and twisted mindgames; obviously, I'm loving it. Also, having met Tony's mentalist sister Effie, I'm now totally over Cassie.
Primeval went out on a different sort of high with its first time-travel story proper (as with most Doctor Who, previous episodes had used time travel to put the story's components in place, rather than actually telling stories about time travel). But as brilliant as it was to see Claudia Sound of Thundered, or realise who the camp was, for me the finest moment was Cutter shooting the super-evolved bat-thing from the future. What made the scene was that he didn't say "we're not dead yet", because he didn't need to; it was all in the eyes, a territorial triumphalism far older than language.

We had been warned in advance that the local Tesco would be spending this week closed for refurbishment (presumably it's just not sexy enough for Stroud Green Road anymore), but it seems a bit harsh that on its last day open it was almost entirely bereft of so many staples - the shelves normally devoted to bread, milk and fruit wouldn't have been out of place under communism. How are we meant to provision for the closure like that?

I remain deeply disappointed in myself over my performance at Quasar (although at least our team still won) but I managed to wash some of the salt out of the wound at the thoroughly enjoyable Guided Missile night. I liked the Duloks' shouty girl pop and Silvery's moments of sounding like Sparks, but bloody Hell they have short songs; in comparison, the Low Edges were practically prog, and I think they managed 13 songs in their brief set. Excellent as ever, obviously.

There's something at once reassuring and terrifying in learning that even Susan Sontag, towards the end, "spoke with leaden sadness of time wasted" - because it's a reminder that none of us, no matter how thoroughly we try to live life to the full, can ever escape the shadow of that great affront, mortality.
Likewise, knowing that even Susan Sontag felt "It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short" is at once a sanction for, and a corrective to, the sensation that with so many things one wants to read, it's a bit of a waste of everyone's time to write - because what if she'd let that stop her?
Then again, all this was learned in a piece by her son introducing one of her last essays, in which we were reminded that even Susan Sontag could be grotesquely wrong at times. Her generalised attacks on television might apply to daytime pap, but if she lets that stand for the whole then she's forgetting Sturgeon's Law - 90% of everything is rubbish. She should have watched more HBO, and seen TV in a flourish of creativity comparable to Renaissance London theatre, happening right now.

Current Mood: semi-coherent
Current Music: No Regrets - The Walker Brothers

You may have seen an article or 20 about how The Wire is the best TV show ever. Four episodes in to the first series, I can't honestly disagree. I perhaps wouldn't go as far as outright best (there's an unaccountable lack of Time Lords, for starters)...so let's say 'best drama set in what is generally believed to the real world', and leave it at that. It's funny, it's terrifying, it's a state of the nation piece, it doesn't have a single character who isn't instantly and compellingly believable, it's perfectly pitched and it never fails to hold the attention. It has also managed to put Baltimore straight to the top of my list of 'places never, ever to visit', but no matter. It took me a little while to acclimatise to the cast - there are an awful lot of alumni of fellow HBO masterpiece Oz, and one in particular is playing a narcotics cop again which sets my brain off on one of its little crossover trails. And, in what I imagine is a rarer overlap, it's less than a week since I saw Dominic West as a Czech student in Rock'n'Roll, and now here he is as an American cop. Though in some ways Jan and McNulty have an awful lot in common; they're both determined to do what they believe is right, and they both tend to piss people off in the process.
(In other happy HBO news, they've optioned A Song of Ice & Fire)

It pains me to say this, but some of you may be living your lives in darkness, unaware of the wonder that is Beta Ray Bill. In brief: Beta Ray Bill is Marvel's version of the Norse god Thor, reimagined as a skull-faced bionic alien space horse (a technique I would like to see applied to several other religious figures, incidentally. What could possibly go wrong?). Stormbreaker: The Saga Of Beta Ray Bill is written by someone I know better as an artist - Michael Avon Oeming - but he turns out to be one of those happy few who can jump the counter and not make a mess of things. Writing huge cosmic stories is not easy - if you're basically using exploding planets as punctuation then all too soon it becomes about as exciting as using commas (see Infinite Crisis or much of its lead-in, for examples). But here, when those planets explode (well, the inhabited ones, anyway), you feel it as EXPLODING PLANETS OMG. It helps that Oeming is unafraid to go as unutterably OTT as this sort of story needs ("Soon all the universes, multiverses and megaverses will be mine!"), but is also capable of reining it in for more 'human' moments without collapsing into distracting mundanity or schmaltz. Cosmic comics are much like Superman comics; they're almost always awful, but when they work, they're one of the high points of the medium. This cosmic comic works.
And now I really, really want a Beta Ray Bill icon.

The new Idlewild single, 'No Emotion', is rather fine. Which comes as a pleasant surprise given what a dreary, dull experience their last album was. Turns out they haven't reached the 'will this do?' phase of their career just yet, they were merely having an off year - now they're back to being spiky and yearning and generally Idlewildish, and it makes me happy.

And this deduction as to what the Hell DC and Marvel have been playing at recently may or may not be correct, but is certainly inspired.

Current Mood: weird
Current Music: Amsterdam Sam - Venini

Profile

Alex

My Amazon wishlist is as good a link as any, right?

December 2017

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

Syndicate

Page Summary

That was the week that was
A raisin loaf with Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' swirled in
Welcome back to Victoria Line lockdown
How had I never heard of Demetrius the Besieger?
The weather didn't screw me and the Victoria line worked; I suspect a trap.
Every year's an in-between kind of year when you're prone to self-mythologising
If I tried to act my age I wouldn't be me
Today, Let Us Speak Only Of Good Things

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 9th, 2025 08:34 pm

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

Entries tagged with hbo

That was the week that was

A raisin loaf with Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' swirled in

Welcome back to Victoria Line lockdown

How had I never heard of Demetrius the Besieger?

The weather didn't screw me and the Victoria line worked; I suspect a trap.

Every year's an in-between kind of year when you're prone to self-mythologising

If I tried to act my age I wouldn't be me

Today, Let Us Speak Only Of Good Things