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

London, being an emblem of infinity, always has something new with which to astound me. the beautiful statues at York House being one example, nymphs sprawled up a waterfall in a way you'd expect in Capri more than Twickenham. And then a few minutes further along, the ramshackle Bohemian labyrinth of Eel Pie Island, one of those places which, even with much of it understandably inaccessible (being people's homes and all), is so folded in on itself that it feels like it's larger than the area it covers. Then back to Richmond proper for Toy Story 3. ( not big spoilers, but more than I knew going in ) Oh, and it was preceded by an ad which opens with the line "Your child's mouth is amazing!" Quite.

Also finally got round to watching The Incredible Hulk which, as you might have heard, isn't very good. I am less bothered than ever about Ed Norton not reprising the role of Banner for the Avengers film, because he doesn't do much with it (and I can't be the only person thinking the obvious choice would be Andy Serkis). Liv Tyler, once so luminously lovely, is almost invisible as Betty Ross; Tim Roth is good as Emil Blonsky, but then Tim Roth is always good, so that's no great achievement. Yes, the film references Stark, SHIELD, Dr Reinstein, Leonard Samson and Rick Jones...but so what? We're past the point now where that sort of thing is surprising; as in comics themselves, a cross-reference does not in itself justify an otherwise dull story.

Speaking of comics, I've not posted much about them lately, have I? Mainly, the titles which are always good have continued to be good, but if you're not reading them yet then there's no real point in drawing your attention to Powers or The Walking Dead or Ultimate Spider-Man or the Grant Morrison Batman complex now. And Marvel's new status quo, The Heroic Age, is still a bit too early to call; is it going to be a welcome breath of fresh air after the darkness of the past few years, or simply Silver Age fetishism? But lately, some good new stuff has started filtering through. Consider Paul Cornell's Action Comics, the first DC Universe comic not by Grant Morrison to excite me in a while. Pairing Lex Luthor with a robot Lois Lane (as in his online Doctor Who story where the Doctor was travelling with a robot Master), the first issue suggests this is going to be an entertainingly amoral cosmic romp. Over at Marvel, Kieron Gillen's last arc on Thor finally gets him out from under the fall-out of other people's events and sends the Asgardians off to attack Hell. I said to Kieron last week that it read like a heavy metal album, and this was before I picked up the Manowar album with a track called 'Thor (The Powerhead' at the CD swap. And Daredevil is in entertainingly killy mode in the opening of the new street-level crossover, Shadowland, even if I am irked at the suggestion that it must be possession causing him to do something eminently sensible which he should have done years ago. But the big news is the start of the last new comics project, at least for a while, by the ever-combative Alan Moore. As the title suggests, Neonomicon is riffing on HP Lovecraft. Moore has talked about writing it in a very angry phase, wanting to make something genuinely nasty as against the cheapness of a lot of modern Mythos stories, and he's already referencing 'The Horror at Red Hook', probably Lovecraft's most overtly racist story, in a way that suggests he's going to stick to that. But so far, it's mainly very funny. Hence me sat on the bus opposite a concerned parent and its spawn, face obscured by the comic's wrap cover of great Cthulhu awakening, chuckling to myself at the scene where the protagonist attends a gig by Rats in the Malls: "I want my thing on your doorstep, my haunter in your dark, I'm getting squamous just thinking how you walk".

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.