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You wanna hold hands in the cemetery
Oct. 26th, 2009 11:08 amOn Wednesday I went to Catch, which has changed a lot in the past few years, to see a show headlined by Tim Ten Yen, who hasn't. The bill also featured a band called Hot Beds, who had a song about how Christmas now starts in October which worked both as a critique of festival creep and a big overwrought festive ballad which they can get away with playing outside December because it's about precisely that. Good work. I was, however, primarily there for the 18 Carat Love Affair who, as well as the usual delights, deployed a top hat and ace new track 'Dominoes'.
Catch might not be quite as typically, terribly East London as it used to be, but Friday found me in an even more atypical East London venue, in that it was seven storeys up (I think that's even higher than Collide-A-Scope) and done up like some kind of voodoo surf kitchen. Even before I started drinking, I saw a pink elephant trot past; fortunately, investigation confirmed that others could see it too and it was in fact a small child wearing a pink elephant head. Probably. It says a lot about The Deptford Beach Babes that they find places like this to play. That's a compliment, by the way.
As Peep Show bows out (and was this series the best extended advertisement for contraception ever aired?*), the comedy baton is handed over and The Thick of It returns. The new choice of minister interests me; Chris Langham having been, shall we say, rather too open-minded about acceptable sexual behaviour, they've this time opted for Rebecca Front, who if anything has the opposite problem; we should probably expect a Jan Moir cameo before season's end.
"Parents who think the new film of Maurice Sendak's picture book Where the Wild Things Are is too frightening for children can "go to hell", the author has said." It's a long time since I read the book, I'm not sure if I'm even that bothered about the film, but this piece gives me massive respect for the man.
Like most people, my first Nabokov was Lolita; for my second I took a recommendation and tried Despair, which almost finished him for me, but last week I finally had a third try and plumped for Pale Fire and, well, he's not a one-hit wonder. ( sufficiently pretentious that I felt a cut was in order )
Also, the last king of Kinbote's distant homeland, Zembla, is called Charles Xavier. The book came out one year before the debut of the X-Men, but somehow I can't picture Stan or Jack coping with Nabokov's prose.
*Though I have just found the perfect childcare solution.
**Well, the third canto has some moments of beauty, but otherwise we're in the authentically bathetic territory of the sort of sub-Frost American poet who gets good reviews of their collected works in the Guardian, but in which reviews the quoted excerpts convince you never, ever to read any of the work in question.
***OK, there's Angie Bowie's autobiography, but even that involved a ghostwriter whom I suspect of setting her up for a fall. Certainly, spending that much time in her company would make me want to do the same.
Catch might not be quite as typically, terribly East London as it used to be, but Friday found me in an even more atypical East London venue, in that it was seven storeys up (I think that's even higher than Collide-A-Scope) and done up like some kind of voodoo surf kitchen. Even before I started drinking, I saw a pink elephant trot past; fortunately, investigation confirmed that others could see it too and it was in fact a small child wearing a pink elephant head. Probably. It says a lot about The Deptford Beach Babes that they find places like this to play. That's a compliment, by the way.
As Peep Show bows out (and was this series the best extended advertisement for contraception ever aired?*), the comedy baton is handed over and The Thick of It returns. The new choice of minister interests me; Chris Langham having been, shall we say, rather too open-minded about acceptable sexual behaviour, they've this time opted for Rebecca Front, who if anything has the opposite problem; we should probably expect a Jan Moir cameo before season's end.
"Parents who think the new film of Maurice Sendak's picture book Where the Wild Things Are is too frightening for children can "go to hell", the author has said." It's a long time since I read the book, I'm not sure if I'm even that bothered about the film, but this piece gives me massive respect for the man.
Like most people, my first Nabokov was Lolita; for my second I took a recommendation and tried Despair, which almost finished him for me, but last week I finally had a third try and plumped for Pale Fire and, well, he's not a one-hit wonder. ( sufficiently pretentious that I felt a cut was in order )
Also, the last king of Kinbote's distant homeland, Zembla, is called Charles Xavier. The book came out one year before the debut of the X-Men, but somehow I can't picture Stan or Jack coping with Nabokov's prose.
*Though I have just found the perfect childcare solution.
**Well, the third canto has some moments of beauty, but otherwise we're in the authentically bathetic territory of the sort of sub-Frost American poet who gets good reviews of their collected works in the Guardian, but in which reviews the quoted excerpts convince you never, ever to read any of the work in question.
***OK, there's Angie Bowie's autobiography, but even that involved a ghostwriter whom I suspect of setting her up for a fall. Certainly, spending that much time in her company would make me want to do the same.
