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

Interesting Bright Club for June, on 'Science and the Media'. Not all of the acts had that much to do with the ostensible theme (plenty, including Strawberry and Cream, just went for innuendo-going-on-outright-filth, not that there's anything wrong with that), but those who did, the tech journalists...the self-disgust was palpable. They don't enjoy producing the reports which annoy Ben Goldacre any more than Ben Goldacre enjoys reading them. I doubt the editors and picture editors enjoy demanding them, either. It's just another of those messed-up Wire-style systems which screws everybody without anyone even enjoying the process. Which obviously we should have known in the first place, but the confirmation is welcome nonetheless. My other recent night out raised questions of its own: how can Jonny Cola, who has grown into a pretty good frontman, be so atrocious at karaoke? Why does a performance poet who looks like the poet in question does think that his work will in any way be enhanced by nudity? And why must the St Aloysius close when, based on my three visits there, it is a home to such reliably surreal entertainments?

I've started watching Castle, even though it isn't very good. A bestselling crime writer helps the cops investigate crime? Exactly the sort of 'high'-concept tosh the US networks churn out all the time. But when the writer is played by Nathan Fillion...yes, I'd rather he were still making Firefly. From interviews I've seen, so would he - he says he'd buy the rights if he won the state lottery and fund production himself. But, alas, he is not. So if we want to see him on screen, Castle is what we've got. And the bastard's charming enough that he can make me overlook everything I don't like about the show (which is pretty much everything else, especially the James Patterson cameo as himself) and keep going. Though I may just be saying that because at times Fillion seems to be auditioning for the role of me. Hell, I'd give him the job.
Because man cannot live by imported US crime dramas on Five alone, even though the summer schedulers seem to think otherwise, I also continued with my project of watching all the surviving Who I've not seen. This time: the surprisingly good Enlightenment, probably the most eerily Sapphire & Steel the show has ever been. Though I say that having only watched the special edition, which uses new CGI and cuts about 20 minutes from the running time - and you don't feel you've missed anything in those minutes, because old Who stories can be added to that long list of things which, though great, no one ever wished longer. As for what Eighties special effects made of the haunting central image of sailing ships racing majestically through space, I dread to think.

And then there's comics. Oh, comics. I love you, but you're getting me down. I bought three new comics yesterday, and bear in mind these were not just random, flailing picks, but carefully chosen on the basis of the writers' past work. Well, two of them were. The one I pretty much suspected was going to be dreadful was Brightest Day Aftermath: The Search for Swamp Thing. The title's a hint, isn't it? But it features the return of John Constantine to the mainstream DC universe, where he originated but from which he has spent many years separated by editorial fiat. And that's the problem here - it's not a comic which seems driven by a story the writer needed to tell, but by editorial - or maybe, worse, branding. Even since the preview DC had in almost all of their comics last month, details have changed, dialogue and art been altered to bring in different characters, and that is very seldom a good sign. And the writer charged with handling this exercise, Jonathan Vankin, comes in with this weird Ray Winstone-meets-Dick van Dyke speech style for Constantine. It is, in short, hideous, and does not bode well for DC's forthcoming universe-wide relaunch, which again looks to be an editorial decision at best. And in the wake of which all the other DC titles are winding down with stories which feel all the more pointless for looking likely to be erased from continuity in three months. Though Paul Cornell's current Superman tale felt pretty bloody pointless even without that looming. You may know Paul Cornell from his many fine Doctor Who stories, or 'Father's Day', but he's also done some very good comics. Having spent a year handling Action Comics (the original Superman comic) without Superman, he'd told an excellent little epic in which Lex Luthor wandered the DC world, meeting its other great villains, in pursuit of the power with which to rival Superman. Except then Superman came back in for the conclusion in issue 900, and everything fell apart, and now we've got a story in which Superman and his brand extensions are fighting the boring nineties villain Doomsday (back then he killed Superman - guess what, it didn't stick) and *his* new brand-extension clones. This is the sort of comic which makes people give up on comics.
And then, away from DC, there's Ultimate Spider-Man, which Brian Michael Bendis has been writing for 160 issues (plus various little spin-offs). And aside from occasional blips, he's kept it interesting that whole time. His alternate take on Peter Parker is still in his teens and, fundamentally, is less of a slappable schmuck than the classic take. Bad things happen to him, he makes bad decisions like teenagers do, but he never seems quite the self-sabotaging arse that the classic and film versions of the character usually do. But now...( Can you spoiler a story called The Death of Spider-Man? )

Not a Books of the Year post (though if you're asking, probably Charlie Stross' Wireless, Glen David Gold's Sunnyside and the Luke Haines memoir). Just some recent reads, for my own benefit as much as anything:

The Wire - Truth Be Told is exactly the sort of book which is described as 'essential' while being nothing of the sort. For all its supposed difficulty, The Wire is not The Invisibles; everything you need to know is there on the screen. But that a book like this, a programme guide-cum-companion, can now be a respectable hardback says so much about how geek culture is now mainstream - it's not just that our shows are now prime time TV, it's that even other shows are now appreciated in the way our shows used to be. The quality varies; David Simon's introduction, predictably, is amazing, while some of the other contributions are pedestrian but not unpleasant, magazine-standard stuff. One detail which irritated me was the parochialism; in that intro, Simon talks about the venality of network TV, how the shows service the advertising and not vice versa, and holds up HBO as a rare exception to the model, without ever hinting that over here, we've had something like the subscription cable model for decades - it's called the license fee, and it powers the only TV empire comparable to HBO in the quality of its output. Come to think of it, why don't the BBC make more of that too?
Elsewhere, Simon and Ed Burns interview Melvin Williams, who played the Deacon in the show, and in real life was something of a Stringer Bell figure, a legendarily smart drug kingpin. Williams appears to be under the impression that in 'England' smack is legal, and junkies can get it for less than a dollar, so drug gangs have no margin. I can only assume this to be a confused understanding of methadone prescriptions, but still, what the Hell? And neither Simon nor Burns picks him up on it.

I've never read any Ian Rankin before, though I enjoyed BBC4's Reichenbach Falls which was based on a story of his. So when I heard he was going to be writing some Hellblazer, I was moderately excited. Except in the event the story in question, Dark Entries, wasn't published in the comic, instead being used to launch the new Vertigo Crime series of compact hardback gra phic novels. Which was a questionable decision because it's considerably less 'crime' than a lot of Constantine stories, being instead a reality TV satire which then becomes outright supernatural - there's none of the grimy backstreet dealing one expects from Constantine, the overlap between the mob and infernal underworlds. Clearly the branding was just because Rankin is known to crime fans. Although if they're aiming mainly at Rankin fans, why in the back is there an ad claiming "Before John Constantine, There Was John Rebus", even though Constantine made his debut two years before Rebus?
But, that's all a matter of format and editorial. It's not Rankin's fault. Judge him on the story, considered as a Hellblazer run. Any good?
No. About on a par with Paul Jenkins, the worst extended run in the comic's history. The satire on reality TV (essentially the set-up is Big Brother in a fake haunted house) would be clunking even if it weren't so dated. The twist is crashingly obvious. The characterisation is unremarkable. Any urge I had to read Rankin's fiction just vanished, particularly since I already have two unread books by another Scottish crime writer, Denise Mina, who did a much better run on Constantine a couple of years back.

I read Alan Campbell's Scar Night a while back, and was impressed; I think I characterised it as China Mieville meets His Dark Materials albeit not quite *that* good. Since then, I have only really thought of Alan Campbell when I'm trying to add an Alan Moore tag to an entry and always get Campbell suggested first, but I finally got around to the sequel, Iron Angel. And it's not dire, but...one of the main things reviews of Scar Night said was, this is too good to be anyone's first book. Reading Iron Angel, with its clumsinesses of pacing, its occasional lapses of characterisation and its baffling lapses into clumsy moralising, makes me wonder if he actually wrote this first and then went back and filled in the backstory. The biggest problem, though, is that the first book's greatest strength was the city of Deepgate itself - a crumbling theocracy suspended by immense chains over a vast abyss. Without spoiling too much, Deepgate is barely in this book, and the other locations - the desert, a poison forest, even Hell itself - just don't feel quite so richly realised. I'll still read the third and final volume sometime (the cliffhanger on which the second part ends is rather impressive), but I can wait.

There was something on the roof in the small hours of the morning. I don't mean the pigeons (I'm used to them), or the crows (I rather like them) - something heavier, and I think wingless. The problem being, especially when I'm still mostly asleep, I have no idea of the relative sound patterns caused by a fat rat, a cat, a particularly agile fox, an urban explorer, a cat-burglar or the killer doll thing from Terror of the Autons. Let's just hope the issue doesn't arise again.

Sighted at Nashville-on-Thames; a suedehead in a Trojan jacket, watching a bunch of cult indie types playing bluegrass cover versions. They talk about the end of youth tribes with a certain nostalgia, but I like seeing the boundaries this blurred.
About that band - they're essentially Hefner and Tompaulin - The Hillbilly Years. And I doubt they'll ever eclipse 'I Stole A Bride' or 'Slender' in our hearts, but I enjoyed them nonetheless.
(I was going to head this post "I shot a man in Neasden just to watch him die", one of the Nashville-on-Thames slogans. But given there was gunfire round my way last night, I don't want to inadvertently frame myself)

Continuing with the theme of London disturbances, I know I'm not alone in finding myself upset by the Cutty Sark fire, but what really struck me was...that ship's in 28 Weeks Later. London may be infested with the undead, whole areas aflame, but the Cutty Sark stands tall. Just like when I saw AI (not a good decision in itself, but that's by the by) in Autumn 2001, there were posters in the cinema warning that the film had scenes with the World Trade Centre which might upset some viewers. They flood New York, they freeze it...but still the twin towers stand sentinel. We envision these apocalypses, tearing down our cities on screen - but some things seem so permanent they survive almost as part of the bedrock. And then along comes some dickhead with a box-cutter, or a can of accelerant, and we realise we weren't thinking dark enough.

Newsarama has a very good Garth Ennis interview, mostly about Hitman (a series of which I've read far too little). But the line that really caught my attention, since I think it may still be my favourite of all his many impressive works - "Hellblazer, it sounds bizarre, but half the time I forget I even wrote it."