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

Have abandoned the whole 'last two weeks' comics idea, because after a month we're round again to mostly the same titles and I would say mostly the same things. But I will mention that in the back of one was a preview of what I believe to be Jonathan Ross' first comic after many years as a fan and advocate. Turf looks rather gorgeous, as you'd expect from Tommy Lee Edwards (last seen on Mark Millar's 1985, but the writing's not letting it down either. It also looks promisingly kitchen sink, not in the sense of 'drama' so much as 'everything but the'. From a mere five pages, it looks as if it's going to be a Prohibition-era New York gangster story. In which one of the gangs is vampire. And then an alien spaceship crashes into Manhattan.
(No idea why talking about gangsters should seem like it naturally leads into this, but another reason I'm glad the weather has cheered up is that lately I've really been getting into Frank Sinatra Sings For Only The Lonely, and if it were still raining all the time, that might have been the end of me)

Otherwise, I've spent much of the week out East, one way or another. Not East London - I've gone no further that way than Stroud Green Library - but the Orients of the imagination. At said library, for the talk I plugged on Monday, John Man (who turned out to be a very dapper local gent) explained how he'd been researching the site, and talking to architects, and he was now on course to rebuild Xanadu! Except when you traced back Coleridge's "stately pleasure dome", it turns out to have been a sort of bamboo marquee. The only nearby river, not called the Alph, is unmolested by caverns measureless to man, and is in fact a rather sluggish stream - imagine the New River minus the plastic bags. I was happier with the fragments of Coleridge's opium dream.
The week's main prose reading, meanwhile, was Daniel Abraham's A Betrayal in Winter. Having realised how mined-out the pseudo-mediaeval crypto-Europe is as a setting for fantasy, Abraham has instead created a wonderfully ornate echo of the Orient (it helps that he's extremely good at writing smell and taste, and this is a world which smells a lot more of green tea than blood and iron). He has constrained himself to one outright fantastic invention - this is a world where a poet who describes a concept well enough may conjure it into life as a spirit to do his bidding - but in this book the main mover is the fratricidal succession customs of his ruling class. In fact if not in principle, plenty of our own world's monarchies shared this, and even now something not dissimilar is pretty much enshrined in corporate life (the very occasional outright appeals to this are the book's only weak moments). The dehumanising effect of this, and by extension of any society which founds itself on unbridled competition within formal parameters, are brilliantly delineated; characters make bad decisions through the terrifyingly inescapable gravity of their histories and their situation, not because the plot requires them to do something stupid. This contrasted with the much-praised The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which I read a week or two back. There, when one character doesn't call the police, he's not calling the police because otherwise the book would have no denouement, so he temporarily becomes a headstrong idiot. Here, you're always *wishing* a character would make a different decision, while knowing that realistically, they can't.
Finally, I watched Miyazaki the Younger's Tales from Earthsea, in which an Easterner takes a resolutely non-Western fantasy...and transplants it to the timeless Europe his father created. I suppose in manga the Japanese look Western anyway, and Sparrowhawk is at least slightly swarthy, so it's not quite as egregious as the whited-up live action version of a few years back. It is, however, a bit of an unwieldy mess. Where I remember le Guin's books, or at least the original trilogy, being quite profound in their concept of the world's Balance - and where Miyazaki senior's films often advance something similar in a way which seems implicitly right, here it just comes across as the mystical hippy b0ll0cks common to third-rate anime. There are moments of beauty, to be sure, but overall it's too long and too dull and too generic. I hope he may learn and one day be worthy of his father's crown, but for now I can only be glad dad didn't quit film-making after all (not that I've seen Ponyo yet).

Maybe not quite, but I have rather been dashing around the place - down to Christ Church & Upton in Lambeth for Riffs & Fragments, a night and a space I'd definitely recommend to anyone looking for a bit of an unusual venue and show. The supports were essentially Mikey Skinner dressed as Ian Curtis and Bjork doing Nico, and as for the headline and voyage home...well, the returned augstone has already written up the shocking truth.

I'm watching the Sopranos endgame on E4, and find myself ambivalent. It all seems so stately and formal; each episode sees most of the cast relegated to background colour as we follow Tony, and see two or three other characters in depth - except now they feel less like characters than pieces whose position we're being shown for the final moves. The Sopranos always excelled at capturing the irrelevances of life - lines like "Fvck blue, red sells!" and "You know how I feel about feet". Now, everything seems charged with meaning. It's a little too consciously Shakespearean.

Posters advising the people of Afghanistan that blowing heroin smoke in their children's faces might not be best paediatric practice; I'm surprised I've not yet seen this denounced as 'cultural imperialism' by the usual suspects.

Belated thoughts on Jonathan Ross in search of Steve Ditko: Neil Gaiman's voice has got much lighter and more transatlantic lately, hasn't it? And when he says Stan Lee was "obviously" right to insist on making Norman Osborne the Green Goblin, against Ditko's objection that "In real life, you wouldn't know who it was" - as fond as I am of the idea that everyone knows everyone really because there are only actually a few thousand real people, I don't know if that should extent to arch-enemies. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that Ditko was *obviously* right.
(Although when he described Watchmen's Rorschach as "like Mr A, except he's insane", I had to disagree. Not that I think Ditko's super-Objectivist Mr A was insane either, you understand. Just...principled)

On holiday this week, and off to Devon for a couple of days shortly; I'm sure I shall see some of you on my return, when I hope to attend Brontosaurus Chorus' Wednesday gig, and should definitely be at Thursday's Luxembourg show.