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

A moment of unexpected beauty: walking to the dole office, hardly the highlight of my week, I find myself striding through a rain of blossom just as, on my earphones, the Indelicates' 'Unity Mitford' peaks. I've just found a lovely map of fairy places, but can't help but feel it has slightly missed the point when enchantment lurks around every corner if you get the moment right. And so often this week, the moment has been right - spring just starting to feel confident that it's here to stay, the grass going mad to get as close to the sun as quickly as possible, everything alive. Everything possible.

Gigging galore over the past week; last night was the first full Soft Close-Ups show, in the Vibe Bar. Does Brick Lane have more curry houses or complete tossers? It's a close-run thing. The Vibe Bar seems to acquire new rooms every time I visit, and now has an atrium, a giant eagle, a postbox and what looks like a hotel. The set was hampered by the poor sound quality one comes to expect at multimedia art happening experiences, but otherwise wonderful, and I'm not just saying that because augstone took my advice after the last show about resurrecting the axe god moves, pedals and feather boa. Or feather boar, as I just typed.
On Tuesday at the less up-own-jacksie Lexington, Jonny Cola & the A-Grades and Glam Chops, both as stylish and pop as ever, the latter with a new jumpsuit for Eddie, whose new Art Brut album came out the day before but who was still here playing small shows with two of his side-projects. The other being Keith Top Of The Pops And His Minor UK Indie Celebrity All-Star Backing Band, a poorly-recorded version of whose excellent show you can see here. I can't decide whether the highlight was 'I Hate Your Band', with thedavidx and James Rocks playing each other's guitars while Keith sings "you could swap members, you could swap songs", or Fvck The MSP, with its rousing final chant of "Nicky Wire can suck my cock", something I hesitate to mention on the internet lest someone write the slash fic where Nicky Wire does exactly that to all 16 members of the band, including the girls.

Listening to the new Decemberists album, I wonder, as I did with the last two, why the same band who can sound so genuinely...unearthly is the wrong word, because I think of our Earth's past, or at least our Earth's past as it should have been, so say 'out of time'...on most of the songs, manage to sound so like a pedestrian indie outfit on the rest. The one which appears to have escaped from a poor PJ Harvey album in particular. Still, all considerably better than the new Bat For Lashes, which I don't even know why I bothered stealing - it doesn't even have one delightfully eerie single like the first album, it's just boil-in-the-bag kookiness for dull people.

Why do I persist in giving each sorry reanimation of the Manics cadaver a try? I suppose this time I have the excuse that JDB's solo album was pretty good (even if that was precisely through its distance from the Manics template), and Nicky's live show amusing in its way. But 'Your Love Alone Is Not Enough'...for all that the 'back to what they do best' talk is even more desperately emphatic than usual this time around, this single is clearly Simple Minds covering 'Help'. It is, quite simply, a disgrace. Please, chaps - stop while we can still just about remember that you meant something once.

Full details on the Parkland Walk plans here - I found the URL on a discarded letter beside the Walk, so clearly it's letting me know not to worry. They seem both sensitive and sensible; I'm just a little miffed that I've never been privileged to see any of the slow-worms which apparently live along one stretch.

I know there's been a bit of a retro crime revival recently - witness all those neo-mediaevalist protests about 'blasphemy' last year - but I was still surprised and almost touched to receive a European lottery scam by post. How delightfully old-fashioned!

Right, so Mars is warming up alongside Earth - but for demonstrably Martian reasons, namely dust storms, rather than because the same solar activity is affecting both planets. Doesn't that seem slightly odd? Let's be quite clear, I'm not saying that human-culpable carbon dioxide et al aren't warming the Earth, because I'm not insane and/or in the pay of Big Oil. Nor do I have any reason to suppose that dust storms and consequent colour changes aren't warming Mars - it reminds me of Daisyworld, but that's no objection. It's more that if two adjacent planets are both warming up for totally separate reasons...well, that's the sort of thing which makes me wonder if something Big Picture is going on, like when two totally different characters published by the same comics company start being taken grim'n'gritty in separate ways by their writers.