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

Eight days since I updated? It's not as if I haven't been doing stuff, much of it fun; I'm just not sure a lot of it would make for an account anyone else wants to read. Consider diggerdydum drinks, for instance, where without the pseudo-fez pictures I'd just be left with a series of recursive in-jokes of which "something for the Richard Dadds" is probably the only one that bears repeating. And the only issue of the day to exercise me centres around the arrival of .xxx, a domain expressly designated for filth. Now, any smart company has all their suffixes registered, don't they? .com may be your brand, but you buy up .net as well, and .co.uk, and so forth. But how about this? Who will register tesco.xxx? disney.xxx? earlylearningcentre.xxx?

So, what is there to report? An old colleague's book launch on Friday (strange how any home movie of a certain vintage now acts as an instant signifier for nostalgia, almost regardless of content), then on to the final Cross Kings AFE. A venue I'd hated beforehand, but have come to forgive even its appalling murals simply by association with this night. It's only fitting for a Stay Beautiful-inspired event to be forced into something of the same wander around London, I suppose, but I hope it can take its atmosphere with it better than SB sometimes managed.
Went for pizza on Saturday. In the great Finsbury Park pizza war, I have always sided with Porchetta, simply because they do quattro formaggi better, but they've just had an ill-advised refurb and installed a load of blaring, glaring plasma screens, so we figured Pappagone was worth another try. And we got outside tables, and the pizzas were yummy (I went fiorentina instead), and everything was fine...and then they rolled down their own big screen. Quiet, at least, but being outside put us behind and to one side of it, and trying to signal to the staff inside felt like being in a ghost story where you're trapped in a mirror. Took 15 minutes to get the bill. Fvcking footballism.
Sunday was a Brontosaurus Chorus show, with some of them supporting themselves as Dinosaur Senior, the dino-masked and -themed covers band. Both fine sets, ditto the astonishing-looking Pussycat & the Dirty Johnsons, who thought I looked bored but how can one be when there's a girl with her hair done up like ears stomping around tables in a catsuit, screaming? I just have a jaded face. All this in the Bloomsbury Bowl, but not the one I knew - turns out there's another bar, the Kingpin Suite, which is nearly as bling as the name suggests; they have Baywatch pinball and even the ventilation ducts are mirrored.

Fosca's supports gave the impression of having been booked with the specific aim of making Fosca look like Lordi in comparison. Of the various flavours of tweeness on offer, I missed most of The Parallelograms, and was a bit disappointed with The Besties (Bis if they'd been hit with a Fey Ray. As opposed to Bis being hit with Fay Wray, which could at least make you some money on specialist internet sites). A Smile And A Ribbon, though, were very sweet. They appeared to have a song about Darren Hayman from Hefner; even if they didn't, the fact that I could seriously entertain the notion that they might should give you some idea what sort of thing we're talking about. Adorable, and wry, and soppy in a good way. I approve. Fosca themselves...they seemed to be having a whale of a time, but I felt Kate's absence pretty keenly, and ultimately I don't think this side of Fosca is quite the Fosca I love.
On the way down, a bunch of 'singing' christians at Vauxhall (and would such a loud massed performance have been allowed to persist so long by a non-monotheist group, I wonder?) obliged me to start in on the Sebastian Horsley autobiography while I waited for a bus, simply because it was *obviously* degenerate. A mild annoyance, as I'm deep into my main book of the moment, Accelerando, whose cover is fairly innocuous even if the content is anything but. Put it this way: Warren Ellis is acknowledged for having looked at the early drafts, and now all the near-future infoSF stuff he's been doing lately feels to me like the pumped-up, dumbed-down version of this. The ideas are fizzing off the page, and most of the time I can follow just enough of them to keep up, but only while riding a vertiginous sense of future shock and information burn. Which is, of course, a sign that form and content have been perfectly married, because that's what the book's about - the transition to the future. Although, as Stross has pointed out elsewhere, things are already changing so fast that if you want to write something people can follow and engage with, you have to damp down the novelty rate; even this much chaos is muffled. And even this recent and this smart a book has started looking dated in places; there's pretty much zero chance that the next US president will be more morally conservative than this one, and oil at 80 euros a barrel in the 2020s isn't so shocking when it nudged past $78 this week.
So, given what a linguistic sponge I am, I apologise in advance if I start dropping the jargon of a cyberpunk tosser over the next few weeks, especially since it might be mixed in with Baltimore street speak, because I've started watching the fourth season of The Wire online, which itself would have seemed madly futuristic, what, two years ago?
And Accelerando is also implying a possibility as to why modern economics are the one thing which, no matter how many times I try to wrap my brain around them, I simply don't get. Because whether we're heading for Accelerando's future or just a collapse, they aren't going to be around much longer; so in among its various handy (and occasionally otherwise) amendments, perhaps my head just doesn't feel it can justify allocating that much processing power and memory to an obsolescent discipline?

Given you can't legally libel the dead, I will be disappointed with any TV drama about TV's arch-enemy Mary Whitehouse which does not depict her as a hypocritical crack ho, portray her killing puppies for kicks, and finish with the image of her burning forever alongside Cromwell in one of the deepest pits of Tartarus. Also from the Beeb: arrests and cautions for stealing the neighbours' internet. Of course, if you're inside as opposed to sat out front of their house in your car, you're probably a good deal less likely to arouse suspicion.

With The System of the World done, I've no library books left, and need no longer let my choices be determined by return dates. I confess there's a tendency within me which would let release dates take their place, but it's a tendency which must not be given its head. That said, I am on a pre-release at the moment; Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope. I'd feared that when people say he can really write, what they'd mean is that he can really write if all you read is books by and about serving politicians, just like fans of Houllebecq and Murakami are impressed because they've been trapped within modern 'literary fiction' and so find said mediocrities comparatively heady stuff. But so far...yes, Obama really can write, and he really does seem like one of the good guys. He's come right out in the bloody prologue in defence of evolution, for starters, which oughtn't to seem much but in modern American politics, does.

I like bookshops as much as the next bibliophile, but I've never really been into the blanket fetishisation of the independents. Derby had two when I was a kid; neither of them was a patch on the chainstores in Nottingham, which of course eventually colonised Derby too and destroyed the relics unfit for survival. Even in London, my nearest is the promisingly named Prospero's Books which is, alas, hopeless for anything except local history. And it hardly helps the independents' cause when you get snotty comments like this one from Crockatt & Powell: "A friend of ours, John, who runs a bookshop in Crystal Palace, had a great saying about Harry Potter. It's not a book - it's a book-shaped tin of beans." No, it isn't. That's exactly the sort of attitude you complain about when the big chains say "customers are consuming media" instead of 'reading books'. Perhaos some in the industry *think* of Harry Potter that way, but then the failing is theirs, not JK Rowling's and not her readers'. Regardless of one's feelings on her merits or otherwise, it's not as if she's the sort of hack who can be accused of jumping a bandwagon - she started the damn bandwagon rolling. She wrote the book she wanted to write, it was a success, so now she's finishing the series she envisioned. Was she meant to leave the story unfinished because people liked it? Do you even know what point you're actually trying to make, you snotty, sanctimonious little indie cretins?