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

Theory: neckties were not an echo of the Roman soldier's neck-rag in the past, but a precursor of earphone leads in the future. Which is why the period of their die-off coincides so closely with the gradual arrival of that for which they played John the Baptist.

Friday: to the Wilmington, where you must not step past the green pillar with your drink because of 'Residents'. No, not in the sense that eyeball-headed monsters will get you. Well, I don't think so. This in spite of the fact that the other side of the same residential block is a square solely occupied by teenage girls getting raucously drunk in a manner which would doubtless provoke an appalled Skins reference if the papers got hold of it. The other risk of being outside is that you get girls at that stage where you genuinely can't tell if they're mixed-race or just really overdid the fake tan trying to get you along to Venus 'nightclub' (and it shouldn't need saying, but that's arguably NSFW). Do they really get much success touting for that outside indie gigs?
The band bringing the drums were late, and aren't quite cute enough to make up for the lack of songs. Because of their lateness, no soundchecks: myfirstkitchen and her Maffickers are having monitor trouble but sound fine in the crowd. However, Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring seem to suffer, their usual magic tragically absent on a day when our hearts were full of spring. I decide that although I ought to check out headliners Cats on Fire, particularly now I've finally got it straight in my head that they aren't middle-class student wankers Cats in Paris (three of the top 10 Google results for that phrase lead you to blogs written by people I know called Steve), this is not the time, and hightail it to the Noble, where the Addlestones is now 10p more expensive, and tastes soapy.
Saturday: fugitivemotel's engagement party. The transition from the glorious, barely-even-evening sun of the walk down to the gentle gloom of the bar leaves me feeling suddenly sleepy, and I initially worry that the rape jokes are not giving his fiancee the best impression of his friends, but by evening's end we're siding with her in an argument, which should count for a lot.
Sunday: join the second half of a genteel Soho pub crawl compered by my_name_is_anna. Well, I think it's genteel, but I'm only half as drunk as the rest of them. Soho really is horrifically gentrified these days though, isn't it? Then up to the Noble again. Pints still priced too high, but no longer soapy. That's something.

Neil Gaiman's 'Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?' concluded perfectly; in spite of the title, I was reminded less of Alan Moore's 'Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?' than of the afterlife metaphysics his next novel, Jerusalem will apparently propose. One imperfection, though - you know those 'Got milk?' ads? There's one in here with Chris Brown, talking about how "the protein helps build muscle". Muscle you can use for beating your girlfriend Rihanna black and blue, for instance. Given some of the daft things DC have censored at the last minute (Superman with a beer, for instance) you'd think this could have been pulled.
At the other end of the Gaiman/Batman axis, I finally found in the library the first volume of Mark Waid's The Brave and the Bold, not as Bat-centric as the old title - and like most Waid it's good, undemanding superhero fun. Which makes a mockery of DC editorial's claims that Vertigo and the DC Universe are separate by having a plot turning around the Book of Destiny, and even a scene with Supergirl and Lobo meeting him in his garden. Next time John Constantine gets left out of a big mystical crossover, they're going to need a new excuse.
It's also the first time I've seen more than a couple of panels of the new Blue Beetle, but he seems like a nice kid, and if he was always this entertaining I can understand why people are upset about his title getting cancelled.
Over at Marvel, Apparitions and Ultraviolet writer Joe Ahearne spins off from Mark Millar's Fantastic Four and spoilers the end of his Wolverine in Fantastic Force, whose backmatter has something rather more interesting than the usual set of sketches - a first draft of the script, from comparison of which with the final issue we can see exactly how much a writer new to comics gets smacked around by editorial and told no, you cannot use that character, or have this one doing that. Worth a look even if you have no direct interest in the comic itself, though that's not bad.

Spent the Bank Holiday weekend strung out along the 253 route as was - well, with one brief jaunt up to the asylum, but other than that - Bethnal Green, Clapton, Seven Sisters Road, Camden. All very jolly but I was especially glad to have Black Plastic back, rocking and packed. Visually, the erstwhile Pleasure Unit is somewhat less of a dive than previously, although they seriously need to sort out the smell. If only people could try to burn it off, it might help - particularly if the burning items were also themselves fragranced, perhaps?
And I've finished London - City of Disappearances. Which feels strange - it's such a capacious book, so it feels a little like finishing an encyclopaedia, or the dictionary. Appropriate, I suppose, given I am about to take a little break from London - though having also just finished Wodehouse's last novel, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, I'm wary of expecting too much calm and restoration from my West Country retreat.

Frustrating though it is that HBO's post-western epic Deadwood never got a proper resolution, in some ways it works out rather well. ( oblique spoilers )
And that, right there, is the birth of America, isn't it? Which is what the series was always about. Hell, you could argue HBO did give us the sequel; once we've seen how the last great attempt at founding a new society was finally bought and buried, all we need to do is spin forward 130 years to watch The Wire and see the long, drawn-out death throes implicit in that stymied birth.
(I got the impression ahead of time that Deadwood's third season was not so well-regarded as the rest; having watched it, I'm at a loss as to why that might be, and of course now I'm not scared of their spoilers, those negative reviews at which I could barely glanced have learned the ways of church mice. Perhaps it was the players, the fire-engine, the loosely-attached subplots of no immediately obvious relevance to the show's main thrust. I rather liked them, myself - they made it the story of a community, not just of the community's leaders)
And with that finished, I'm into a rather different TV proposition: Justice League Unlimited. I love that popular culture has got to the point where Aztek and Alan Moore stories are considered appropriate fodder for children's television.

Hamfatter - yes, I know they went on Dragon's Den to get funding, but they're not that bad, are they? Not great, but in the pop-bands-with-guitars field, one of the less offensive examples.

Am not convinced by the latest rejig of 2000AD's monthly sibling, the Megazine. Packaging it with a slim reprint edition is not an inherently bad idea - but the price has gone up from £2.99 to £4.99, and next week's accompanying reprint is Snow/Tiger, a perfectly good strip but also a very recent one which, like many readers, I already own in the weeklies. And while it's good, I'm not sure it's so good that I can use a surplus copy for comics evangelism, y'know?

'Silence in the Library' was a Moffat Who story, so obviously it was brilliant. Yes, in some ways he's repeating himself, but so what? They're good tropes. Give them another airing. ( Spoilers! )

When the last night of drinking on the Tube was announced as a possible Event by an associate, I was keen, not least because it intended a keynote of civility. Not even as a protest per se (I see the ban as a regrettable necessity - one of those blunt instrument laws like the age of consent which undoubtedly leads to injustices, but which remains a least worst option while we have neither the social nor technological maturity to enjoin and enforce what should be the one immutable law: Don't Be A Dick). But once other people had the same idea - people for whose character I could not vouch, and whose agendas were not quite the same - I paused. And once it was on the front of both freesheets, that was me out: carnage was inevitable and I didn't want to end up as part of the statistics proving the wrong point. So when I went into town in the afternoon, I had a tot of absinthe* from my hipflask on the bus in, another on the Piccadilly Line home, and said my own quiet farewell. With the bonus that I realised it was so discreet, it could probably still be managed post-ban.

For reasons I can't entirely explain, my usual practice is to build up a big list of potentially interesting acts to check out on Myspace, and then go through them en masse. Maybe it's like heats, to limit how many will get chance to win me over? So anyway, I had one of these runs and lots of them, as usual, were weak. The best thing was probably a rather epic, Iain Sinclair-style new Madness track, but by now you should all know whether or not you like Madness (though if you don't, you've maybe just not heard the right bits). That aside, the highlight was 'Stuck on Repeat' by Little Boots. Which I ought to find as generic as I do much modern electropop by hot girls (this one's ex-Dead Disco), yet somehow I don't. Maybe I'm giving her a pass for naming herself after Caligula? Maybe Hot Chip production helped? Maybe sometimes a song just stands out from its crowd.
(Best Myspace, though, was the new Swimmer One side project. The music did nothing for me, but I love the bio and the name: Sparklegash.

A Grant Morrison first issue is usually a big deal. The first Seven Sisters I read on a bus, spellbound, then went right back to the beginning and started all over again. The first All-Star Superman, I think that was three times. The first Final Crisis I read, shrugged, then read New Avengers 41 which is hardly the best Secret Invasion issue yet, but still made more impression on me. Then nipped in to the British Museum to reacquaint myself with the gods**, then came home reading the penultimate Dan Dare (real Single Manly Tear stuff) and the first issue of Millar's 1985, which is exactly the sort of supers-invade-our-poor-heroless-world stuff Morrison usually does so well. ( Those Final Crisis complaints in spoilerific detail ) It could yet improve. I really hope it does.
Grant's latest Batman issue, on the other hand, is brilliant.

France really doesn't make them like this anymore, does it? Why not?

*It was the only hipflask-suitable drink I had in the house. But beyond that, it seemed apt.
**I never formally decided, even to myself, that I wasn't going in while the terracotta army was there. I just somehow never found myself wanting to go in there during that period of time, and I don't really believe in coincidence.