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

Visited Kew Gardens for the first time yesterday, and it's magical. For somewhere so popular, it still doesn't feel crowded; for somehere so labelled, it doesn't feel lifeless. I suppose it's a combination of two of my favourite things, a mad old-style library manifest as a country house garden. Plus, dragonflies! The day before I'd been worrying that I'd yet to see any this year, but clearly that's because they're all getting busy down in Kew.
We also saw some guinea fowl. Even speaking as a vegetarian of nearly two decades, their combination of unflappability and fat-assedness screamed 'lunch'.
Then on to see the magnificent Philip Jeays, chanson supergroup in tow, launch his new album (and yes, I'm going to keep linking to him whenever the subject arises until you all become fans, buy his albums and send him straight in at Number One). The Jeays Battersea Barge shows are the social event of the season, but that season is early December; I have seen him here at other times of year before, but not for bloody ages. The usual supports make jokes about this, and it turns out that last December, when I thought the Speech Painter was maybe improving, I was just overwhelmed by red wine and christmas spirit; his presence is once more justified only by the extra piquancy he gives 'Geoff', Phil's song about shagging the Speech Painter's wife. We expect the new album set to be followed by a hits encore, but in spite of finishing early, there are only three old tracks. Stranger still, the new album doesn't include 'Thank You British Airways' - but then, 'Mr Jeays' was being played two albums before it was released. The new stuff is, however, brilliant - and he seems to be playing to his strengths, with fewer 'war is stupid' songs than ever, more lovelorn and timeworn heartbreakers. Thank you, Mr Jeays.

For the first time since he died, yesterday I deliberately listened to a Michael Jackson track. Not one of the ones blaring out of every car and shop, but the last one I remember having any interest in, before it became clear how wrong he'd gone: 'Scream'. And it's a bloody mess. In his paranoia, you can tell he's almost approaching that wonderfully dehumanised sound R&B revelled in around the late nineties and early noughties, but perfectionism and endless second-guessing just leaves it clattering and confused. Shame. For a happier Youtube experience, I recommend Nathan Fillion from Firefly as Green Lantern; alas, this is a fan-made trailer for a film that does not exist but still, how good does it look? That was from the mailout of one of the UK's best comics shops, Page 45; the other, Gosh, also alerted me to a gem: Comics creator stopped by Transportation Security Administration for carrying script about writer under suspicion by Transportation Security Administration.

Read Poul Anderson's Brainwave on Tuesday - a novel in which the Earth exits the intelligence-dampening field in which it's been stuck for millennia, and everybody suddenly gets a lot smarter. Reading it in the park at least served to keep me posted that no, this was not really happening, but it's still an astonishing book - and one with which I especially sympathise in weather like this, because I can feel the heat making me dumber. It's from four years before Flowers for Algernon, and while I've never read that (science fiction which gets mainstream critical acclaim usually leaves me suspicious), I've read enough things which riff on it to suspect that it got a lot of inspiration here. Poul Anderson is a weird one - my dad is a fan, so realistically I must have read some of his stuff as a kid, but I have no idea what. The only one I could tell you for sure is The Broken Sword, an impressively bleak fantasy novel he wrote before fantasy became entirely codified, set in the real Middle Ages (complete with all the stuff people then knew about but we tend to ignore) rather than an analogue, which always gets me on side. This...this has almost nothing in common with that, except a certain majestic clarity of vision. It's not flawless; it does at times feel like the cosmic vision of Olaf Stapledon forced into a format which looks something a little more like a novel, and suffering accordingly (Anderson's evolved humans, for instance, still all seem to be locked into heterosexual monogamy - because he was more stuck in his ways than Stapledon 20 years earlier, or just because he had less space?). And the idea that the superbrains of future Man find no consolation or worth in any of the species' past achievements...well, I'm as contemptuous of humanity as the next person who'd gladly sell us out to the first civilised species that made contact, but I don't buy that. Anderson's brain-boosted humans abandon TV for magazines, then magazines for books; after the change, one simpleton thinks 'I can read a comic book. Maybe I can read a real book now.' Well, as someone who can happily go from Ulysses to Mighty Avengers, and always hated John Stuart Mill's spurious distinction betweem 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures, you can guess how I feel about that. In the end, the advanced humans become something not unlike Iain Banks' Culture - just a bit less fun. But still, that's an awful lot to fit in 160 pages. Plus, you know that thing from...Mickey Spillane, maybe? 'Whenever I don't know what happens next, a guy comes through the door with a gun?' Poul Anderson goes one better. One chapter ends when a chimp comes in with a gun. On an elephant.

I'm not especially into signings. I'll go along if it's a mate who might not be drawing a massive crowd, to show support, but queueing for hours just to be in the Presence...why? But, Gosh's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen signing was going to have copies of Century: 1910 weeks early, and that's another matter. Except, you could buy them in the shop, and the signing was around the corner. Well, since I was there, and my immediate agenda was to read '1910', and then read the Guide and the main bit of the paper, and since I was there, and since I could do all that reading while queueing...might as well hang around.
Two hours later, they're all read. I could make a start on the review section, but I wouldn't be doing that anyway. The question 'Why am I here?' no longer has a solid answer. I depart, and by the bus stop find that the Hawksmoor church has a deeply surreal exhibition in its basement, which I wander in perfect solitude. Alan Moore's From Hell turned me on to Hawksmoor; I feel more sense of communion with him down in that crypt than I would awkwardly saying 'Hiya!' in a crowded signing room. And then as I board the bus, a perfectly-timed text tells me there's a picnic in the park. If nothing else, the queueing means that relatively speaking, I'm one of the sober ones.
As for the new volume...well, I know there's been talk of each third of Century being a satisfying read in itself, so that the inevitable delays aren't a problem. But this is very much an opening chapter, and it's one whose animating spirit is Brecht, meaning that like him, at times it's rather heavy-handed for my tastes. But it's still Alan Moore, and it's still the League, so the intricacy of the patchwork is still staggering, the story still has more heart than it's sometimes given credit for, and the Iain Sinclair riff is absolutely hilarious - if you've read him, anyway. Whenever they turn up, I'm very much looking forward to the rest of Century, not least because the promised crossovers include Vincent Chase and David Simon's Baltimore. Speaking of Baltimore, there was a drunk perv getting thrown out of Power's on Friday who looked like an uglier Frank Sobotka, but who insisted he was a police officer. It wasn't until his attempts to taunt the bouncer expanded to include moonwalking that I realised, this must be what Michael Jackson looks like nowadays, whiter than ever (or indeed, red); minus the hat, mask and shades; and after the doctors' instructions to bulk up ahead of his London shows. I was there to see Borderville, whose singer weirdly turns out to have done the same course as me at the same college, while really reminding me of Jesse from Flipron. Extremely good band, but while they're great showmen, part of me wonders whether some of the subtlety and structure of the songs doesn't get lost live. They're also, I think, the sort of band who would benefit from a smart producer, as opposed to the sort who just spaff a load of money on one so's to have something to talk about in interviews. Other acts are Rubella (very pretty, shame about the lack of songs), and Alvarez King(?), who at least realise that they are 'freshwater fish in salt water'.