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

Got another reminder last week of how much I dislike big gigs these days, whoever's playing. Maybe if I go to another I should get a seat? Not because I'm getting older, but because the rest of the crowd are - at Magazine I think the only punters I saw younger than me had been brought by their dad who, like most of the audience, looked like he'd been into Magazine first time around. And really, trying to be part of the energy down on the floor doesn't work so well when it's just a load of old blokes (plus a very occasional woman) standing around. And did venues all look the same like this before a few years back? I remember the Shepherd's Bush Empire and the Kentish Town Forum having their own personalities, but now I can barely remember which one I'm in (and that's not down to intoxication, not at their drinks prices). Magazine themselves were...as you'd expect. They played a little more of the new stuff than I'd hoped, and 'Because You're Frightened' was a surprising omission. The banter was a little embarrassing. Devoto describing them as "Magazine version 6.0 service pack 1 - thank you for upgrading" just emphasised the sense that, whereas on record their music still evokes a sense of vast, alien horizons and urban nightmarescapes, live it's always going to be forcibly grounded by the fact you're watching a bunch of old guys (plus a couple of ringers).
Far more satisfactory - and far stranger - was Luke Haines at the Old Queen's Head. I don't even especially like his wrestling album - its reference points are a little before my time - but seeing it done in that living-room-like space, with Kendo Nagasaki sat at the side of the stage watching TV, and a psychedelic rabbit stew recipe for an encore...well, that's not a gig where you end up wishing you'd stuck to the recordings on your headphones, is it? Or the weekend before, where I'd seen Thee Faction punching out songs about GDH Cole in a community centre where one of the crowd was dancing with a small dog. These are shows to cherish, not just part of The Live Music Industry.

Seen on the screen: the new Tintin film. Which, in 3D at least, is staggering. Most of the 3D films I've seen, it's been a gimmick which made for one or two impressive moments. Coraline was the only one to use it thoroughly, and well. But Tintin simply uses it better. It helps that the motion-capture world has a real physicality - one which reminded me somehow of Frank Quitely's art, cartoony yet still solid; only Bianca Castafiore teeters into the uncanny valley. Whether it will grip on the small screen, or flat, I couldn't say, but on the big screen it seemed a far worthier adaptation that many commentators are giving it credit for. I suspect they're just even older than me, and as such were rendered even more queasy by the rollercoaster ride of it.

Underneath one of Islington's libraries is a museum, where there's currently a Joe Orton exhibition called Malicious Damage. Containing, principally, the Islington books which Orton and his lover were gaoled for defacting. 1962 to 2011 could almost seem like a record time from outrage to assimilation if I didn't remember the Times giving away a Pistols CD, but even leaving that aside...they deserved to go to prison for this crap. The detournements of books' covers and blurbs, even taking into account that they predate Photoshop, are clunky and unfunny. Orton and Halliwell claimed to have been treated harshly "because we were queers" - but if this was a gay rights thing, how come they vandalised a book by Auden and Isherwood? If it was a protest against "endless shelves of rubbish", then how come the most common author by a long way is Shakespeare? And most of the rest is blameless guidebooks and handbooks. Set against all this, the exhibition also holds their diary of a trip to more liberated climes, and their sexual adventures there - and it is dreadful, dreary stuff, successful neither as literature nor filth. They were, in summary, louts, not revolutionaries. So if nothing else, with this exhibition Islington libraries get the last laugh.

*Primrose Hill on Bonfire Night. Going out among the people made for a change, if nothing else, but not one I am in a hurry to repeat.

No, not the Ian Curtis flick, which I've still yet to catch and increasingly suspect I'm not that bothered about seeing. Just the theme of several recent bits and pieces:

- Aside from the Alice-themed Are Friends Eclectic? and a little light Saturday pubbing, most of my recent outings have seen me tramping around Islington via its libraries in search of some items they definitely owned at one point but now seen unable to locate. I've found various other stuff instead, of course, of which more in a moment, and I've also found things in between - a section of Regent's Canal I'd always missed before, for one, which feels like our own Little Venice. But also the city farm in Paradise Park (which, disappointingly for Divine Comedy fans, is not called Paradise Farm). A rather feeble effort compared to Mudchute's, it is nonetheless decked around with dozens of signs warning you to disinfect your hands the second you've stopped touching the animals AND wash your hands before you leave AND don't even think about eating in the area (except for the cafe, obviously, that has special magic anti-germ force fields). Yet I remember plenty of farm trips when I was young, or just wanders down to the end of the road to feed the cows, and while if they licked your hand it smelled rather pungently of baked beans such that you probably would wash your hand before eating anything anyway, I don't recall any of us ever being struck down by whatever terrible blight these signs imply we should fear.

- Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason by Jessica Warner - one of the other things I found in that library tour, and a book I borrowed without even reading the blurb, just for that name. While the story of gin's origins would be interesting in itself (its inventor was one Franciscus de la Boe of the University of Leyden - is gin the true Face of Boe?), Warner is more intrigued by the moral panic which ensued as a prototype of modern drug scares. And this is very much The Wire in periwigs, with the counterproductive legislation, the product getting stepped-on, the snitches and the underclass. The main difference being that the paternalism back then was more blatant:
"skirmishes over drugs are necessarily skirmishes over how people live - and sometimes seem to waste - their lives. When we react against a new drug and the effect it might have on other people's behaviour, we are also reacting against the culture in which the drug has taken root. This is what makes the rhetoric of 18th century reformers so refreshing: unlike modern reformers, they were unabashedly elitist. What they had to say may not have been attractive, but at least it was honest."
The lawmaking classes back in the gin age wanted the proletariat healthy and fertile, so the population would keep growing, so that there were plenty of soldiers and sailors to be expended, and plenty of labourers to keep wages low. Those priorities may have changed slightly as mercantilism has given way to consumerism, but not that much - just witness the horror with which the CBI greets any increase in the minimum wage, let alone the slim chance of that legislation actually being enforced. Warner is fully aware of how much continuity exists and, after a survey of the nineties War on Drugs, finishes with predictions about what might be the next drug scares now crack had been defanged, assuming they would either involve new drugs or new settings for drugs, not seeing implicit in her own account that you can manufacture a panic out of nowhere if you need one. Hence the absurd and mendacious 'super-skunk' fear being put about these days - because when you have a generation of parents and legislators who mostly tried dope themselves back in the day, you can't expect them to fall for the same 'reefer madness' lines unless you claim those reefers are a new and deadly upgrade. Hence 'binge drink Britain', essentially the gin panic with a miniskirt and a fake tan.

- As regards consumerism taking over from mercantilism, I finally saw John Carpenter's They Live. In 1988 this may have seemed like SF/horror, or black comedy, or satire - now, except for one interesting hypothesis about why governments and businesses aren't doing more about climate change, it's mainly stating the obvious. Carpenter proposes special sunglasses which enable you to see the coded messages in advertisements - messages like OBEY and STAY ASLEEP. In a world where Carling, a supposedly 'fun' beverage, plugs itself with a simple BELONG, who needs the shades? The CCTV cameras are obvious now too, we just ignore them anyway. And as for the big speech by the member of the elites who've sold humanity out to to Them: "I thought you understood. It's business, that's all it is. You still don't get it. There ain't no countries anymore. They're running the whole show. They own the whole planet. They can do whatever they want." Tell me something I don't know.

The Long Blondes show...I'm glad I went, but it was in some ways a frustrating experience. The set was understandably heavy on the new material, and while I suspect I'll grow to love it all, smoother sound and all, I didn't know it yet. And being heavy on that meant they were light on material from Someone To Drive You Home, one of the best albums of recent years. I was discussing this with stephens and exliontamer afterwards, concluding that the problem was that they didn't play 'You Could Have Both', against which you have to remember that the vast majority of concerts in the world also fail to include 'You Could Have Both'.
Though it might help that the vast majority of concerts in the world also don't have Kid Acne supporting. Goldie Lookin' Chain except not funny (or, if you don't like GLC, 'even less funny') - comedy rappers coming from the school of comedy which thinks that simply mentioning a certain class of retro artefact is, in and of itself, hilarious. Please die now.


The budget was predictably depressing, with the party of the working man cutting corporation tax by a quarter, raising duty on booze and fags and announcing yet more measures to force the unwell back to the coalface.
In other government idiocy news, even compared to her colleagues Margaret Hodge is really quite impressively stupid. She is suggesting, as a new idea, libraries in shopping centres; Haringey already has one, plus one in a leisure centre. Better yet, she suggests that libraries should maybe draw in new audiences by stocking comics!*
The vast majority of the libraries I've used in the last 15 years - and there have been a lot, over many authorities - already stocked comics. The trend over time has been for that range to deepen and expand. Our libraries are in the hands of someone who clearly hasn't the faintest clue about them.
It's not great, is it? But off on the other side of the world, I did find one small good news story to offset some measure of the despair.

Have finally remembered to stop Facebook's Bookshelf from sending me impertinent emails. Yes, I have been reading The Pickwick Papers for longer than a week. It's 800 pages long and I've had various other books on the go, AS YOU WELL KNOW. Well, that was your last such irritating jab. Now all it needs is a fifth button on its recommendations, for 'Yes, I Have Already Read Another Edition Of This Book, I Told You As Much'. You'd think it would spot where titles are identical, wouldn't you? But I suppose it considers that 'identical' is just one step on from 'similar', and 'similar' makes for good recommendation - especially when you're dealing with someone who has 19 volumes of Ultimate Spider-Man on his shelf.

*I'm leaving to one side the question of whether comics are actually any good for attracting new readers in the first place, though if you read certain comics sites too much you may take it as a given that they don't. In my experience of my fellow browsers, it's usually a pretty even mixture between fans reading the stuff they couldn't be bothered to buy, and kids plucking superhero stuff out pretty much at random.

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?