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

A few weeks back, Livejournal stirred into something approaching life, and in the manner of the old days there was A Meme. About what people were up to a year ago, five years, ten. And the nostalgia of it all...well, people sometimes forget that the '-algia' in there is pain. That was an apt precursor to The World's End. Shaun of the Dead was already a film about the pain of growing up, so stack the best part of another decade on top of that, then go see it with some approximation of the old gang, and even a film assembling this much comic talent (and there are plenty of laughs) is going to feel like a twisted knife in places. I can't recall such a bittersweet comedy which is still so successful qua comedy since Withnail. Part of the power is in the way it dodges polemic: yes, refusing to grow up is seen as a sad and sorry way to live, but so is growing up. In so far as there's any kind of answer, it's the knowingly grand and ridiculous grab for another, impossible option which reminds me of the Indelicates' 'Dovahkiin'. It's not just a self-regarding elegy, mind - it also has lots to say about how the new cinema ideal of bromance is no more realistic or healthy than the Hollywood take on romance. Which is obviously no less saddening. I'm going to miss the Cornetto Trilogy, not mollified by their being in part films about missing the films you grew up on.
Also seen at the cinema (on the same day, which I don't believe I've ever done before - it does the trailers no favours): Pacific Rim, in which Guillermo del Toro has giant robots punch monsters, and vice versa, in a delightfully solid way which always feels like a Guillermo del Toro film, until the humans start interacting with each other when his normal sureness of touch deserts him, and even normally dependable actors fall oddly flat (one excellent and un-publicised cameo aside). And not at the cinema, but on the same day as its cinematic release, A Field in England. Which I applaud, even while thinking that a little more forethought about the casting might have made it more instantly convincing as the psychedelic horror it wants to be, rather than the oddball comedy as which it inadvertently opens.

More nostalgia: the Buffy-themed bash at the GNRT. Even more so, back to the Woodbine for the first time in a while, and the last time was itself the first time in a while too. As if to emphasise how long it is since that was a regular haunt, there's foliage growing into the Gents' and a wine called Tempus. Subtle symbolism there, Life. Still, there have been times of living too. Celebrating the Solstice atop Primrose Hill, and walking back from Mr B and the Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra along the dusky Parkland Walk, eternal moments when the level of drunk and the setting are exactly as they should be and one feels no longer apart from the world but in contact with the infinite and suffused with joy and peace. Took xandratheblue to Devon and, in the five years or so my parents have been there, this was the first time I swam in the sea, as against paddling, because for once I'd timed it right weatherwise. And we found a dragon skull on the beach. Then to lovely little Sherborne, and up Dancing Hill, which is in fact rather steep for dancing but I guess satyrs are nimble. Back in London, we were greeted by St Paul's and it's blue trees as a reminder that, lovely as holidays can be, this is the place to be. Though we did then go see Eddie Argos in an Edinburgh show about holidays, which might have made more sense before rather than after our own. Still lovely, mind.
(Other Edinburgh previews seen: Henry Paker, being powerfully bald, and Jeff Goldblum and his prawn (aka Ben Partridge). Not seen near so many this year as the last couple)

Wrapping up, since who knows when I'll get round to posting again: having chance to dance to Pink for the first time since Don't Stop Moving stopped moving, and 'Elephant Elephant' for the first time full stop, was a delight; I like the view from Telegraph Hill, though not the walk there in the sun (and it should have kept the old name, Plowed Garlic Hill); and I love how in a European city the Holy Thorn Reliquary would be in the cathedral, what with having part of Jesus' crown of thorns inside, but in London we just stick it in a back room of the museum, because we basically have the warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark but let tourists wander around it 'cos we're cool like that.

*I've seen the Indelicates and Keith Totp (&c) twice since I last posted, and the Indelicates don't even play London that often anymore. Even seen the very seldom-sighted Quimper, who are coming into their own with the new live set-up, all disturbing projections and shadowed lurking. Also Desperate Journalist, who already had a good soundscape going, but are a lot more compelling now exliontamer has started really going for it on stage. And Mikey Georgeson aka Vessel aka Mr Solo, formerly a frequent fixture (and I think probably still the performer I've seen live the most times) for the first time in a year or so. He was, of course, excellent - the new tracks as good as ever, in particular 'I See What You Did There' and the waltz which sounds like imperial phase Bowie working with Tom Waits.

Finished Paul Auster's New York Trilogy this week. I feel like I should have something to say about it, but every attempt I make reads like I'm trying to describe a dream. What a strange book(s).

The new Cathal Coughlan album is, unlike the Fatima Mansions records which first brought him to my attention, very quiet. Almost flat at times. Of all the strange little boys who were blown away by Scott Walker and decided to be singers too, Cathal was the one with the voice most like Scott's in sheer scale and power, but here he seemed to have made his Any Day Now - not a bad record by any means, but not one that grabs the attention either. Live, though...live these songs are so much more dynamic. They may not grab you, but they envelop you instead, and at times I was closing my eyes just to savour how damn *big* Cathal's voice is. Not that it was all new ones; aside from earlier solo work, there are two Fatimas tracks chosen with an eye to the Tube strike, 'The Loyaliser' ("Lockdown London!") and 'You Won't Get Me Home'. We do get home eventually, but only after a fairly lengthy journey that takes us past an estate agent called Herzog. Which was not even the most intriguingly named business we'd seen that evening.

Loved the first two thirds of Mad Men's return. As soon as Betty turned up again, I realised why it was that half hour had been so good. When did she get so desperately boring? I enjoy the focus on the new agency, and if we're going to see more of those left behind, please can it be the rump of Sterling Cooper, not the vacuously decorative ex? Also checked out Swingtown, whose emphatically 1976 setting makes me suspect they were going for some of the same retro kudos; in practice, it feels more like Anchorman. And the direction is clunky as Hell. Still, the script managed not to insult my intelligence at any point, which is rare enough for a US network series or one broadcast on ITV1. Plus Jack Davenport and Deadwood's Molly Parker gave very good central performances. I'll stick with it for now; knowing there's only the one season somehow makes it feel like less of a commitment.

Thursday: I am needed in the ancestral acres, with a chainsaw. Groovy. Further explorations of the old haunts are considered, but a downpour arrives with sufficiently precise timing to make clear that the time is not right. So it's a more leisurely journey back to the Lexington. Two entirely unconnected books I've read recently have brought to my attention that it stands right next to an area formerly considered to be Merlin's; I'm unsure what to make of this, but it has to be something, especially since the plaques I saw en route included one for the former home of that pioneer of the rum and uncanny, Charles Fort. The oddness continues - post-Britpop nearly men Ultrasound (subject of a running joke which has surely now backfired in Kill Your Friends' face) do not seem to have aged in the slightest, or even changed their outfits - except bassist and sometime singer Vanessa, who is turning into Tamsin Grieg. They play all the 'hits', and even manage to redeem the title track of the inexplicably disappointing album Everything Picture, but while the songs sound the same as they did first time around, when they were brilliant, rallying cries for the kids disappointed by the laddish morass into which Britpop had sunk, now there's something missing. These were songs that captured the zeitgeist of a time that never quite happened; through no fault of their own, they now struggle to connect. I don't regret going, and in a few months I'm sure I'll be playing the EPs again, but I don't think I'll be at any further shows.

Saw The Hold Steady on Tuesday. The last big, current band I wanted to see and hadn't. And they did not disappoint me. OK, so they didn't play 'Soft In The Center', or 'Your Little Hoodrat Friend', or even 'Killer Parties' (which I was sure would be the encore), but then it's not like they played a short set, or any duds - they just have too many brilliant songs to fit them all in. On stage, they're an object lesson in how things which shouldn't work, sometimes do. Craig Finn holds all the attention, and Craig Finn is without doubt the least cool man I have ever seen fronting a band. Hell, even just in an indie *audience*, he would be noticeably one of the less cool ones. And he flaps his arms about and overacts double-takes during the bits where he's not singing and does spiels about how great it is to see "real people in a real room having a beer, not on Myspace or the messageboards" which from anyone else would have me cringing. And yet, it works. You know when parents tell kids that all you really need to do to be accepted is believe in yourself? And every kid who isn't incredibly stupid wonders how the parents have forgotten so much about the world as to think that, because while belief matters, belief won't cover everything? Well, turns out that if you believe as hard as Craig Finn, it is enough. Literally, magical.
(Speaking of magic - Alan Moore fans may be aware that he worships the serpent god Glycon, in large part because Glycon was comprehensively discredited centuries ago. I didn't know much more than that, here's an essay Moore wrote about Glycon a few years ago, and it turns out that Glycon was conceived by the False Prophet Alexander, "a plausible and gifted but amoral fraud". My new second favourite classical namesake)

Wristcutters - A Love Story is almost a parody of US indie cinema. Shannyn Sossamon, Tom Waits and a bunch of HBO and Arrested Development alumni are suicides trapped in an afterlife which is the same as life, except slightly worse - dead end jobs, broken-down cars, and an inability to smile (though wry half-smiles seem to be fine). And yet it's actually rather lovely - both smart and sweet, in the way that so many of those films try so very hard to be and don't manage.

Sometimes we all get anxious - if time is money then it explains how time and money can get wrapped into a sort of unified field theory of worry which then starts pulling in everything else, however outlandish. And London, being not half so stony-hearted as some have made her out to be, tries her best to cheer you up, pulling aside the curtain so you catch sight of side-streets you've never seen before in all the times you've gone down that road, but you're so convinced that you're in a hurry that you mark them for future investigation, so she makes them more and more enticing until finally you crack and trot down there and suddenly, even though it looks like a normal enough little street, the light and the birdsong and the breeze all come together and counteract that knot of troubles and everything's alright again. And you carry on along your way, lighter of spirit, and accomplish your missions and find time to drop in on the British Museum too, where while looking for something else entirely you find a statue of the Remover of Obstacles which contains at least enough of his essence to convey the appropriate sentiment of "Hey, we got this! Relax." And you know that something will turn up - it always does.

Went for another walk later on, to take in the fireworks - and I've no idea what most modern Britons are celebrating these days, whether it's an expression of anarchist tendencies which I can hardly begrudge even if they have chosen an iffy figurehead, or if they just like blowing sh1t up. Personally, commemorating the defeat and brutal execution of the seventeenth century's answer to al Qaeda still works for me, but whatever it's nominally about, the lights, and the bangs, and the smell of gunpowder in the air..it's magical in itself. And this year there was no magic in the air on Hallowe'en, in spite of all the witches and vampires on the streets, but it's stupid to be purist about these things, for the nature of the magical is not to be constrained by formulae - if it were just another science then what would be the point?

In spite of not having to fit myself around a working day at present, I still find myself fitting more or less to a standard diurnal schedule - most of the time. Last night was one of the exceptions, charging drunkenly around Youtube looking for gems I half-remembered or never caught, like this Whipping Boy video, and making the sad discovery that 'Stranger Than Fiction' by Destroy All Monsters is not half so good as I remember. I also watched '£45 zombie movie' Colin; obviously the same thing that made me keen to see it (zombie Al!) is the thing which most hampers my suspension of disbelief, but even so it has some haunting moments. I worry, though, that telling the story from the zombie's point of view, making the zombie-killers such unsympathetic characters, will be very counterproductive come the zombie apocalypse.

Other items of interest:
- Grant Morrison and Stephen Fry are pitching something for BBC Scotland.
- A rather entertaining drubbing of Florence & the Machine.
- "Presenter Lauren Laverne has signed up to write a series of novels for teenage girls." Anyone else remember when that news would have been terribly exciting?

Granted, the last few times we were in the Noble we moaned, only partly in jest, that there were people drinking there, sitting in our seats, and generally lowering the tone. But if nothing else, shouldn't they have secured its future, meant it wouldn't have to be up for sale again, leave it in a position where one person's illness doesn't force us to resort to a nearby 'pub' no longer even fit to be named in this journal lest by doing so I pollute the servers and screens?
That's the thing about dark times - they're dark on every level. You can do your best to ignore the geopolitics, and heavens know it's tempting, but then you find your local's deserted you, your supermarket's discontinued your favourites, your shoelaces just won't stay tied. Once the entropy takes hold, it's as above, so below.
And then, of course, there's a reversal of fortunes in the war in heaven. And suddenly you see a pug acting the fool and a terrier with the yawns, and the moon's impossibly big and watching over Stoke Newington, and the setting sun lights the clouds behind the Gothic revival water tower like Camelot never fell.

I've finally finished a manga! Libraries have a nasty habit of getting enough volumes to hook me, and then never buying the rest - or in the case of Koike & Kojima books going one worse and, as sadistic as the stories, getting in the first couple - and then a random smattering of later volumes, just to tempt me. But well done Westminster, for completing their Death Note collection, even getting in the fairly superfluous companion and offcuts collection How to Read. Even leaving that aside, I can't deny there's some fat could be trimmed from the 12 volumes of the story proper, and that it never entirely gets to grip with the questions its central premise raises (vigilante killings of criminals by means of a magic notebook - I'm in favour, myself, but there's an emotional weight to the question which never quite makes the page). It does, however, manage some real moments of shock as it twists and turns, and one of those curious little tropes I always love is the ridiculously convoluted fight scene between incredibly smart antagonists, each of them revealing that they've anticipated the other's anticipation of their anticipation of...and so on. Consider the Seventh Doctor at his most Machiavellian, or Vandal Savage versus Resurrection Man in DC One Million, or Iron Man versus Black Panther in Enemy of the State II. Consider even, as comic incarnation of the type, the time-travelling fight scene in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey - Death Note is fit to stand among them.

Meanwhile in Western comics vigilante news, Garth Ennis' epic Punisher run has concluded. Now there's a comic prepared to address its moral issues, albeit one which never collapses into the pathetic hand-wringing which has often haunted the series when other writers were doing it wrong. The problem was that the Punisher - who is sensible, and shoots criminals in the head - was co-existing with allegedly more admirable heroes who beat criminals up, and then leave them alive to escape from gaol and kill again once another writer wants to use the same villain. By shifting him ever so slightly out of that context, Ennis could cut loose - without going too far the other way and turning it into a puerile celebration of violence for violence's sake. There's a very good scene in Warren Ellis' new issue of Astonishing X-Men in which Cyclops takes a similar clear-sighted line on how, in the superhero's line of work, sometimes killing is the only sensible thing to do. Contrast this with this week's editions of Secret Invasion and Captain Britain - they're both good comics, but in both heroes who normally make a big deal of the Heroic Code and how they Never Kill show no compunction whatsoever about killing invading Skrulls. So implicitly, even the life of an intractably evil human is sacrosanct, but those green alien mofos? Waste 'em. Leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, doesn't it?
Startlingly, DC also managed to put out a good comic this week - Grant Morrison's latest Batman RIP reassures me that, the evidence of Final Crisis aside, he hasn't been totally subsumed by Levitzseid's Anti-Fun Equation just yet.

So I managed to bolt another chunk on to my mindmap of London; now I know how Holland Park connects to Ladbroke Grove to Portobello Road to Notting Hill to Kensington to Hyde Park, which brings me back to the fields I know. Holland Park has an awful lot of private squares, doesn't it? I have always thought of these as little enchanted kingdoms, and today I (legitimately) had lunch in one - not a Western one, one near Regent's Park. Lovely as it was, it was disappointingly like a smaller, neater, slightly quieter park, and entirely devoid of waiters with champagne, gambolling nymphs or anything which would quite pass muster as a grotto.

Could this be the worst book ever? Touched by Evil: The True Story of the Psychic Powers That Saved Me from a Life of Abuse.

Sainsbury's have started doing what is effectively quarter-skimmed milk, with orange caps, for those who find skimmed too watery and semi-skimmed too fattening. I suspect this is somewhat pointless, yet still strangely brilliant in a decadent late-capitalism sort of way.

A quiet weekend there, especially yesterday when I barely left my room, and didn't even click until afterwards how suited that was to an afternoon of gaol-based viewing. Having finished off the second half of Oz season 2* I settled in with my Guardian freebie disc of Kiss Of The Spider Woman. I'd always wondered why William Hurt kept getting acting roles when he manifestly wasn't able to act; I knew he had an Oscar but I assumed it must have been a precursor to Halle Berry's - perhaps people made of wood were the Academy's desired tokenistas that year and Pinocchio didn't have a film out? Turns out I had him wrong - he's more a Vin Diesel, a man who acted extremely well, once and then realised he didn't need to bother, he'd still get paid. But let's not allow his subsequent decline to sully that one magnificent performance. Let's pretend that he died like James Dean, maybe even got the Oscar posthumously...what a star! What a performance, what a film, what an opposite number in Raul 'Gomez Addams' Julia! I'm not even sure what I took away from the film - something beyond its slowly reconciled opposition between dreams and revolution, for sure, but something somehow formless and at once poetic yet inexpressible. A film about films that don't exist, from which I take away a message I can't verbalise - apt, I suppose.

I wouldn't like it thought that I won't give credit where it's due on those rare occasions when something good comes out of christianity. this computer game, for instance. Or, more timelessly, GK Chesterton. I've read his poetry and fiction before, and been very impressed by the quality of his mind and the facility with language which models it so well upon the page. Orthodoxy is the first I've read of his essays, and even if I don't agree with his ultimate agenda, every page has gems of phrasing and logic:
"Shakespeare is quite himself; it only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else."
"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
And so forth. I must always concede that he at least presents a case to answer, which is more than can be said for most thinkers. Ultimately, I think he and I could rally together behind Planetary's slogan: It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way. He wants a mystery and a grandeur to life, but also a welcome; if we would both guarantee those inalienable rights by reference to different gods, well, heavens know it's a lot closer than I feel to most of my nominal co-religionists.

NME Hack Throws Ill-Informed Strop is not, in and of itself, newsworthy. When features editor James McMahon grunts that "Today's Observer Music Monthly feature on 'the new eccentrics' has left me dizzy, shaken and above all furious at what my beloved rock music has become. For one thing it was seemingly written by an idiot whose politics and ideology have been formed by books rather than life experiences and emotional toil"...well, that's just the sort of wilful ignorance one expects from the strand of music journalism which loves illiterate oiks for their own sake, and that was ever with us (it was the Stud Brothers who epitomised it back when I followed the Melody Maker, but Garry Bushell's probably the most famous exponent). What interests me is that among the acts which this apparently appalling document of prole-hate champion are...Foals and Lightspeed Champion. Both acts which the NME cannot currently do enough to rim.
Also from the Department of Huh?: the shooting component of the accursed Olympics is to be held in Woolwich. The games are taking place primarily in East London. And what part of London goes more iconically with 'shooting' than 'Hackney'? OK, maybe Peckham or Brixton should also be in with a shot, but Woolwich? OK, it has the Arsenal, but a better way to honour that would be to move Arsenal back there (probably in the first hundred Things I Would Do If Super-Rich, that). Then again, we are talking about sportists here, so probably shouldn't expect too much evidence of brainpower.

Are Tube announcers going to keep mentioning the East London Line closure for the next 2 1/2 years (plus however much longer it takes in reality)? Because if so, it's going to get very boring.

*Not quite the first season's equal, I think, perhaps because Tom Fontana was only co-scripting many episodes. A few of the plotlines feel a little forced, harbingers of the whole 'ageing drug' fiasco when s4 was overstretched. But certainly there is still much to love and more to be impressed by. And less of Poet's Speech Painter-style performance poetry, which has to be a bonus.

Finally got round to Wolverine Vs Batman The Prestige, which is not nearly as amazing as some reviews had led me to expect, but entertaining enough in its way. I did approve of the film resisting the temptation to make either of its duelling magicians the hero; though each has his own distinctive character, the abiding impression is that they're as bad as each other. I was under the impression that there was a twist ending, which distracted me; the plot's not *obvious* per se, but each step follows naturally from the one before, such that I was never exactly surprised. The best thing about the film is the great David Bowie as the even greater Tesla; it saddened me that the film included the standard "all characters/fictitious" disclaimer in the credits, for Tesla's role is already too easily consigned to forgetfulness or legend.

British Sea Power's latest mailout claims that one of their new songs sounds like "Amy Winehouse meets Charles Babbage". If anybody can live up to that, it's BSP.

On my brief lunch break today, at least half the people I saw in the street were so repulsive that I could have been in Derby. It was bad enough that I ended up taking London sodding Lite (the weaker of the two weak freesheets) from a distributor, just because she had a reasonably pretty face and I wanted to encourage a little civic beauty.

It pains me to admit it, but I'm still in no state for Beautiful & Damned. Have booked tomorrow off, and now intend to sleep 'til I'm better. If that means getting woken up in 20 years by a team of new-fangled superheroes, one of whom will later shoot me, then so be it; I am bored of sniffling.