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

I thought my policy of always giving a new HBO show a chance might have hit its limits with Hung. Especially since it's on More4 on Thursday nights, at an end of the week already overloaded with Sarah Jane Adventures, Wednesday night's HBO double-bill, Friday's comedy options...but much to my surprise, the first episode at least was excellent. The trailers have been going about it all wrong, emphasising the comedy/prurient angle we've all seen before. Whereas the show itself...in much the same way as The Wire used police and drug gangs as a way to examine the decline of the American city, or Deadwood looked at the birth of the nation by way of a psychopathic publican, Hung examines the squeezing of the middle class through the example of a hard-up history teacher with a really big cock. It's more about the way everything seems to be falling apart, and the sense that our working life is not working out like we were given to expect, than Thomas Jane's endowment.

Wednesday night: augstone brings billetdoux along on a mini-US deputation to the Noble, establishing that even if Obama has more sense than to be seen with Gordon Brown, the special relationship is alive and well at the level of indie pubbing. Thursday: a Brontosaurus Chorus show, the first I've seen since icecoldinalex joined and the first time I've really heard the song for which I spent two days filming - Johnny and I have to resist the urge to re-enact the video on stage. The gig's in a weird little basement venue on Denmark Street called Peter Parker's; there's no Spider-Man iconography that I can see, but the cocktail 'Peter Parker's Cvm Shot' still makes me think 'thwip!'. The support are a noise duo whose name is never announced (my own guess: Sine Cosine Tangent); they're playing in front of a projection of Akira, the subtitles on which provide a perfect excuse to stare at the girl's fairly impressive cleavage. All told, I probably had enough material for a post on Friday, but I had to dash off to catch Seizure (ignore all the pretentious guff in the leaflet, the key details of this art project are that it is very blue and very shiny and quite magical). However, this is probably for the best as it means I can gently draw a veil over the weekend.

I keep hearing good things about the comics of Matt Fraction, so I keep picking them up when the library has them, and I'm still not convinced that he's anything but Warren Ellis's even more try-hard younger brother. All his characters sound the same: "Let's make out and whip up more plans for mass slaughter", cackles the villain. Whereas Iron Man himself gloats "Your tax dollars pay me to beat the Hell out of people like this. (I decline the paycheck, by the way)". Which is identical in tone, and also completely meaningless - he just came up with a line he liked and deployed it even though it required a caveat that then made no sense. The only way I could persevere was by pairing it with the disappointing Micro Men on BBC4, there being a strange congruence of themes. "My biggest nightmare has come true...Iron Man 2.0 is here...and I'm not the one that made it" - the cheap, easy to use and ultimately disposable new technology as plot driver, all made me start identifying Clive Sinclair as a British comedy version of Tony Stark. I don't know what that says about anything but it says more than Fraction's Iron Man.
(Also read something where he at least tried to ditch the tech fetish and the KEWL! - Secret Invasion: Thor. And that was just horribly characterless, in spite of featuring Beta Ray Bill, so maybe the usual mode is the lesser evil for him. The failure of this one was thrown into particular relief by how funny and characterful and cosmic and generally *fun* Secret Invasion: Hercules could make a story starting from a fairly similar premise)

*Although having made derogatory mention of Ellis, it's only fair I acknowledge that the final issue of Planetary was beautiful - the first comic since the end of Captain Britain to leave me both crying and laughing in public. Even if that doesn't explain why it was so ridiculously late. Or why newuniversal is. Or Doktor Sleepless.

p_dan_tic's birthday Kaput gets extra points for the skeleton DJ, but I'd have approved anyway. I don't recall any songs I actively dislike, and while there was lots I didn't know, what I did included 'Short Skirt Long Jacket', Associates, Johnny Boy, Big Black, Magazine and Pulp's 'Party Hard'. More Of This Sort Of Thing (Outside Caledonia), basically.
The next day, I was a little disappointed that the British Bonving Championship was called off on account of the cold - there were even some snow spectators by the pitch, and the pastime was invented in Scandinavia! But on balance, the world would be a better place if more sports were liable to the governing body sacking off the national championships and going down the pub instead. The pub, though...amuchmoreexotic had it about right when he classed Highgate's Woodman as "a remedial pub. If you pull a really bad pint, they send you here". Then on to Pennfest for an increasingly assured Brontosaurus Chorus and the sharp-suited, Kinks-y (but not Britpoppy), suave sound of Friends Of The Bride. But not, alas, myfirstkitchen's own set, because the second room was too well-hidden. Which was unfortunate, because otherwise Leonard's was so nearly a very good venue to bear in mind for future events. Ditto Saturday's London Stone, really - there was one bad feature, one (admittedly well-decorated) pillar blocking the dancefloor off too much, or I'd tell everyone to start putting stuff on there immediately.

Among the various unseemly details grudgingly revealed about MPs' expenses, the one which interests me most is that "Gordon Brown seems to have charged for a Sky sports subscription". Not so much because it means Gordon's been giving public money to Rupert Murdoch - we all knew Brown was his prag. But because it illustrates once again his fascination with sport which, lest we forget, is what left him half-blind and wonky of face. I usually admire bloody-mindedness, but there are limits.
(I have a lot of respect for Heather Brooke's determined campaign to get the expense information in the public eye. But am I the only one to also find her kinda hot?)

A letter in the current edition of The Bookseller:
"Regarding Kate Mosse's rejoinder to critics of the Orange Prize, here's a story I was told by the wife of a man who used to work for Orange. Apparently it used to provide staff interested in running reading groups with a room, coffee and biscuits, etc. One day the mail employee suggested that he'd like to organise a science fiction reading group. He was told this wouldn't be possible as "only men read SF", and that to start a reading group focused on the genre would be sexist."

I was unimpressed with Matt Fraction's much-praised Casanova; loved the art, sure, but find the artist better employed on Gerard Way's Umbrella Academy where the script isn't so try-hard. But I decided to give him another chance, and read Punisher War Journal. Which was better, but still not great; he was still being a bit too self-consciously cool, and that resulted in narration that was too much Matt Fraction and not enough Frank Castle. And this time he didn't even have an artist who could save him; Ariel Olivetti looks like a poor man's John Bolton*. Not dire, but just sort of...there. So, final chance: the first collection of The Immortal Iron Fist.
Wow.
Obviously, it helps that it's a co-write, but then Brubaker's not a writer I love either - it's just that they work perfectly together. Brubaker's grit and noir smarts tones down Fraction's hip excesses; Fraction makes Brubaker more fun. The result is a time-spanning pulp romp, sort of Doc Savage crossed with a Bruce Lee film if Bruce Lee films were anywhere near as good as their cultural cachet suggests, plus dragons. I definitely want to read more than this, and it makes me hope I'm wrong about Iron Fist being a Skrull, because this is one story where I can't see how that angle would do anything but undermine it.

*If you only read one comic this year about bored British teenagers discovering Faerie, read Suburban Glamour. But if you want a second, Carey & Bolton's God Save The Queen is very pretty.