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

On Friday I watched Saint Etienne's Finisterre film. Which was quite reminiscent of the Robinson film about London I watched a while back, except that being St Etienne's, it was still in love with the city. Not blindly, never that - it reminded me of GK Chesterton's (biased, but not wholly untrue) observation that believers are allowed moments of doubt, whereas sceptics don't allow themselves moments of belief. I'd just read a link alasdair had posted to Iain Sinclair on the Boris bikes, reading which I'd wondered - does Sinclair never have a day in London - the city that's made his name - where everything goes right, the birds are singing and people are smiling? I do. I had one when I went to the library and Tesco and the park after watching the film which acts as a sort of primer for days like that, in its meandering way. You don't have to be a St Etienne fan to enjoy it, so long as you're a London fan; there are occasional appearances from the band, but just as people in cafes or the like, because the film is no more or less their story than anyone else's. It's the story - or rather, a story - of the greatest city on Earth.
(Something else it had in common with the Robinson film - it wouldn't play properly. One scene in the middle stuck, and once I was past that, it ground to a halt before the end. When I get institutional loan DVDs of feature films, they always play fine. But once it's a meandering art film, glitcharama. Why is this? Are the discs weedier and less resilient, or are the fans more careless?)

Then on to the first tolerably large weekend of the new year: a wonderfully messy Nuisance on Friday and a West Country-style cider party on Saturday (complete with far too much Wurzels on Spotify), then a Sunday of culture/weird sh1t. The Museum of Everything is Peter Blake's collection of oddities, a sort of 20th Century Sir John Soane's where stuffed rats play cards while the rat police sneak up to raid them, miniature circus rides spin far too fast, old dolls and clowns are as creepy as ever, and a three-legged duck gets to look as stupid in death as he did in life. Even the gift shop (£25 for a candle?) and the loo (a door at either end? That would unnerve me even if I hadn't seen Zombieland the day before) are rum and uncanny. I don't think it's around for much longer but it's definitely worth a visit while it lasts. The evening was a Jackson's Way talkshopinar. Achieved! Nor has the week got off to a bad start; last night's bout of Monsterpocalypse was the first game I've beaten johnny_vertigen at in months. And quite the victory, too: any game where your giant robot can twat the other fellow's Godzilla-type with his sword, and then impale him on a big spiky alien building before a barrage of tank fire finishes the job, is a game of which I would approve even had I not been victorious.

Over the past week I have spent time among some strange tribes - the rats and bats and strange throat-clearing old folk of the Richmond riverside, the rollerbladers and riders of Hyde Park, even the little lost sliver of Central Europe that is Mayfair (it even has the slightly substandard police - though there's maybe a hint of India to it as well; I've never seen a library with so many Wodehouse books, not even my own). And this combined with an article from the previous weekend about the death/rebirth of travel writing and set me thinking, has anyone ever done a London travel book? By which I mean, one where writers from one part of London write pieces about other areas as the foreign lands they so clearly are. It seems like an Iain Sinclair kind of project, but I think I've read all his London prose and I don't recall anything quite like this. Arthur Machen's London Adventure has something of the spirit I mean, but as one would expect from a man of a more imperial age, his project was much more centred - he spoke of "the London known to Londoners" and the lands beyond, whereas I think more in terms of separate but equal principalities under London's aegis.

There was something about the light - and later, the quality of the darkness - on Saturday night. So walking to The Melting Ice Caps/Soft Close-Ups/Soft Ice Caps (no Melting Close-Ups this time) show at Gloomy (played to a rightly rapturous crowd, some of whom I don't even know personally), I didn't necessarily want any music in my ears. Except that I had the chorus of 'We Are Golden' by Mika stuck in my head and I sure as blazes needed something to shift that, because even as someone who rather liked (most of) his first album, I find the new stuff irksomely hollow.

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.

Spent the Bank Holiday weekend strung out along the 253 route as was - well, with one brief jaunt up to the asylum, but other than that - Bethnal Green, Clapton, Seven Sisters Road, Camden. All very jolly but I was especially glad to have Black Plastic back, rocking and packed. Visually, the erstwhile Pleasure Unit is somewhat less of a dive than previously, although they seriously need to sort out the smell. If only people could try to burn it off, it might help - particularly if the burning items were also themselves fragranced, perhaps?
And I've finished London - City of Disappearances. Which feels strange - it's such a capacious book, so it feels a little like finishing an encyclopaedia, or the dictionary. Appropriate, I suppose, given I am about to take a little break from London - though having also just finished Wodehouse's last novel, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, I'm wary of expecting too much calm and restoration from my West Country retreat.

Frustrating though it is that HBO's post-western epic Deadwood never got a proper resolution, in some ways it works out rather well. ( oblique spoilers )
And that, right there, is the birth of America, isn't it? Which is what the series was always about. Hell, you could argue HBO did give us the sequel; once we've seen how the last great attempt at founding a new society was finally bought and buried, all we need to do is spin forward 130 years to watch The Wire and see the long, drawn-out death throes implicit in that stymied birth.
(I got the impression ahead of time that Deadwood's third season was not so well-regarded as the rest; having watched it, I'm at a loss as to why that might be, and of course now I'm not scared of their spoilers, those negative reviews at which I could barely glanced have learned the ways of church mice. Perhaps it was the players, the fire-engine, the loosely-attached subplots of no immediately obvious relevance to the show's main thrust. I rather liked them, myself - they made it the story of a community, not just of the community's leaders)
And with that finished, I'm into a rather different TV proposition: Justice League Unlimited. I love that popular culture has got to the point where Aztek and Alan Moore stories are considered appropriate fodder for children's television.

Hamfatter - yes, I know they went on Dragon's Den to get funding, but they're not that bad, are they? Not great, but in the pop-bands-with-guitars field, one of the less offensive examples.

Am not convinced by the latest rejig of 2000AD's monthly sibling, the Megazine. Packaging it with a slim reprint edition is not an inherently bad idea - but the price has gone up from £2.99 to £4.99, and next week's accompanying reprint is Snow/Tiger, a perfectly good strip but also a very recent one which, like many readers, I already own in the weeklies. And while it's good, I'm not sure it's so good that I can use a surplus copy for comics evangelism, y'know?

It's not just that Johnny Vegas seems to have catastrophically misjudged the situation when he tried to redefine sexual assault as comedy; his timing sucked, because even had it come off as outrageous comedy rather than simple outrage, it could never have been as funny as a seal attempting to mate with a penguin.
One wonders whether the ghost of Dworkin would insist that the seal must have been reading p0rn, or that really this was about power rather than sex? Dworkin, incidentally, is among the topics on which Laura Kipnis' The Female Thing is mercilessly brilliant. Don't take that to mean Kipnis is one of those dreadful Mail-endorsed types repenting of feminism; she demolishes those quislings just as thoroughly as the 'wounded bird' school of feminism, but what she does best of all is anatomising how the Spectacle (although she never uses that word - call it global capitalism if you will, or the Thing - you know the one) has used feminism, just as it does everything else, to play the workers off against each other to the system's benefit. Not that she lets that take her off into the 'back to the village' territory where Greer among others seems to have got stuck; she is justly puzzled by the way in which feminism has often hymned Nature when in so many ways it was nature which dealt women a bad hand, and culture which has enabled such steps towards equality as have been managed, not least by building a world in which physical strength is no longer paramount, and sex need no longer entail all the risks and discomforts of pregnancy.
If the book has a flaw, it's that Kipnis doesn't have many answers, but simply by asking the right questions she's ahead of the game. Normally, even feminist books which have some great stuff in will end up spiralling off into facepalm territory at other points - hi there, Female Chauvinist Pigs. Whereas Kipnis is wall to wall 'Yes!' Constant 'You've hit the nail on the head!' Which nuance and smarts, inevitably, have meant an almost total lack of media storm compared to more high-concept, more obvious, less incisive alternatives. So it goes.

Doesn't it make you mad the way nobody has a real job? It's like everybody's scamming everybody else for scraps...everything breaks. No one remembers anything. The present is just a blank and all the time it feels like there's this great catastrophe impending...and the only thing that's holding it at bay is spit and lies. Do you feel that?
- Alex Cox, Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday (The "Quasi-Sequel" To Repo Man)

So far, most of the morning's strategy meeting had been devoted to coming up with a political logo. The pirates were very keen that it should reflect both the Captain's caring, inclusive side, but also his tough leadership qualities. After a lot of debate they had eventually decided on a picture of a bush baby holding a brick.
- Gideon Defoe, The Pirates! In An Adventure With Napoleon

Managed about 60 pages of Nicola Barker's Darkmans, which is 60 more than I'd read of most Booker-shortlisted works. It didn't seem to be wholly worthless, but fundamentally it was still coming across as a middlebrow Iain Sinclair. I'm sure if you've never read a book about the past bleeding into the present on London's edgelands as development tries to erase it, then it's very good. Personally, if I want that and I'm in the mood where Sinclair's too dense for me, I've got the pulpy vitality of Moorcock.
Of course, this left me with something of a quandary since I had those 800+ pages earmarked to see me through my week off, and none of the other options were quite right. I enjoyed Alan Campbell's Scar Night a lot, once I finally got round to it; it's His Dark Materials meets Perdido Street Station without seeming cynical about it. But it's too recently read for me to start the sequel just yet. Similarly, I need a little longer to recover from The Wire before I dive in to George Pelecanos. And yes, it was good of that Dalai Lama biography to turn up on the very day when I'd been wondering over my toast whether such a thing existed, but it's the fiction itch that needs scratching. So more or less at random, out of the stacks came Derek Raymond's The Crust On Its Uppers, and it's shaping up rather well. In a way it's a companion piece to Mad Men, set just as the sixties begin to swing, in an insular society of alpha males - but here it's London's gangland, the sort of place where Performance starts out. I'm just suprised Guy Ritchie or one of his imitators hasn't filmed it yet; sure, much of the effect is in the cant-heavy prose, but that never normally stops anyone.