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

Greatly enjoyed Stay Beautiful on Saturday, though it's strange being at the eighth birthday when you remember the first night so clearly, feeling like some sort of elder statesman of glitter, even down to being startled at the younger generation's excitement over the Powerpuff Girls theme because it's slipped your mind that it doesn't get a regular airing anymore...

Julien Temple's Pandaemonium has little on its Wikipedia or IMDB pages to flag it up as Romantic Poetry - the Hollywood Years, but by blazes it should. All IMDB manages is to flag up the anachronistic jet-trails in the sky during the balloon ride, having perhaps not also spotted various other modern features throughout the film, intended to convey a sense of Coleridge as a prophet whose visionary powers (and opium habit) cast him loose from time - even though the opening scene says as much, explicitly, in among some astonishing camerawork. And there is a lot of that, and it does make a change from the normal slavish biopic template of which I am so, so bored. But plotwise...Linus Roache's Coleridge is the brave rebel, undone by opium but still a visionary hero - no mention here of that government job in Malta, or of the boringly conventional strain in his criticism. John Hannah's Wordsworth is a vindictive hack, almost incapable of writing - even 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' is here his sister's suggestion. Wordsworth is the person from Porlock and, not content with that, later convinces Coleridge to burn 'Kubla Khan' in spite of Lord Byron's efforts to huy and publish it. But! All is well. For Wordsworth's loyal sister, although also reduced to a wreck by the dastardly sell-out, remembers the poem in its entirety! In your face, Wordsworth! Of course, to better emphasise the picture we get no quotes from Wordsworth's few genuinely great poems, while all the Coleridge quotations are from two of the three masterpieces he produced over a poetic career which was broadly acceptable but unexceptional.
There is a grand tale to be told in the relationship of Wordsworth and Coleridge - I picture something like HBO's John Adams. This hero vs villain melodrama is not it. Although it turns out that the bit about Southey writing the original Goldilocks story is pretty much true. Who knew?

Have never quite known whether I should investigate the works of WG Sebald. I like psychogeographical odysseys - but these ones get good reviews in the literary pages, such that I suspect them, and the tone of self-indulgent wispiness which seems to get literary fiction types all hot under the collar sounds stronger here than elsewhere in the genre. Will Self's short essay on Sebald would, I hoped, decide me one way or the other, but no. still up in the air. And in a world with so many books, when you can't decide whether you're likely to like one, then it's better to read one you're pretty sure you will. Once I'm finished on the current crop of books - and that could take a while - I think it's flying cities in space for me, rather than lonely trudges around East Anglia.

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?