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

Another film I'd been meaning to see for ages: Network. Like They Live, I wonder whether its anti-TV vitriol is still too much for it to be broadcastable? Strange if so, because if Network has one message it's not anger - even if it is the "I'm as mad as Hell and I'm not going to take this anymore" speech which everyone quotes. No, it's how the Spectacle will assimilate anything, ( spoilers, for a 1976 film, but still ) Just look at all the money Rage Against the Machine made Sony last Christmas.

The Sunday wobble about which I've posted previously wasn't the whole weekend, of course. There was a leaving do for rosamicula, which doubled as a welcome home for dawnage and whatever Rick's LJ is, as if in obedience to some hitherto unknown Law of Conservation. At the Walrus, which I've always wanted to check out simply for the name, but which I usually only pass en route to the more prosaically named Horse. I'm not sure what it would be like as a winter pub, but in summer, it has the garden to be a godsend. Then another new drinking destination for Saturday's birthday festivities, Bourne & Hollingsworth, which exists somewhere between wartime speakeasy and provincial tea-room, and serves cocktails in teacups, and where I made my first attempt at MP3 DJing, for a given value of 'DJing' and certainly not one which merits posting a setlist, before heading on to DSM where I remember very little beyond the presence of the DBB. I blame the Laundry novels for any current addiction to TLAs.

The sketch which made me laugh most in last night's (as ever, admittedly patchy) Mitchell & Webb was Caesar. But the ones which most impressed me were the one where they bit the Apple hand that feeds, and especially the opening self-criticism session. As against Peep Show, their own work sometimes gets accused of a certain traditional, cosy quality. Good to see them rolling with those punches and coming back with this level of savagery.

When it wasn't giving me the fear re: space, one of the things I like about that Ray Bradbury collection* I'm reading is that, for all that it came out through a science fiction imprint, it doesn't feel obliged to be all SF. I'm only a quarter of the way through, but if a story doesn't need to involve a spaceship or a time machine, then Bradbury doesn't throw one in just to keep within his genre; sometimes all you need is two men meeting on a beach. As I may have mentioned once or twice before, I'm not too keen on genre boundaries, which is why a project like the Neil Gaiman co-edited anthology Stories interests me. If you know McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, this is basically a less confrontational, more entryist approach to that. The cover, instead of a masked lion-tamer, is just contributor names - it's almost as studiedly uninformative as the title. And where Chabon's introduction railed against "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory short story", Gaiman simply extols the joy of the story in which the main question is - "what happened next?" The two share a couple of authors - two of the big beasts, in fact, Michael Moorcock and Gaiman himself, both among the main reasons I'm reading either collection in the first place. Beyond them, Stories makes a deliberately wide-ranging selection. There are other people I actively want to read - Gene Wolfe, Joe Hill. There are people I've vaguely meant to read - Michael Swanwick, Walter Mosley. Then there are people I'd never have thought to read, some reviewers' darlings - Joyce Carol Oates - and some big sellers - Jodi Piccoult. The clever bit being, of course, that for any reader, each of those four categories is going to include a completely different selection of names. In the interests of fairness, I'm reading every story, and if I've not been convinced to investigate the oeuvre of any of the writers I wasn't already interested in, nor has any of them been quite as bad as I expected (though there is something of a fixation on stories of elderly siblings). Obviously, part of me hopes that the people coming in for Oates will be rather more impressed by Gaiman...but the world's not quite that satisfying, is it? And if nothing else, I will probably read some more Mosley. Maybe even some Swanwick, though I was put off by the self-evident falseness of one of his central conceits: apparently characters in books don't read books. Even leaving aside the bookish heroes of MR James, Lovecraft and Borges, what about Dorian Gray, Don Quixote, Scott Pilgrim?

*I put the non-Bradbury part of Monday's post into the 'who do you write like' meme currently prowling Livejournal, and it told me Edgar Allen Poe. I was quietly pleased, but then realised I was missing a trick, especially when I saw Bradbury himself was one of the answers, and entered his contribution instead, but apparently he writes like Douglas Adams.

Finally seen No Country For Old Men and...well, OK, it's not actively awful like most films which win loads of Oscars lately, but I don't quite understand the fuss. But then, The Big Lebowski aside, I never did quite get the Coens - they make films I watch once and enjoy, but then feel no urge ever to revisit. I will concede that, in Anton Chigurh, the film has one mesmerising performance, and that its reluctance to go for one of the standard thriller resolutions is commendable. I'll further admit that their sense of whimsy does a lot to leaven the relentless, slightly monotonous bleakness which put me off Cormac McCarthy when I tried to read another of his - this is as much a film about bad service and dumb questions as heists gone wrong. But at no stage was I either as gripped, or as amused, as I was watching Psychoville. At no stage did I find myself thinking that yes, this is what film-making is about, which I felt plenty during last week's Ghostbusters marathon (and how had I never twigged before that the Warden from Oz = Winston the black Ghostbuster, aka Ernie Hudson?).
Also: while finding that No Country For Old Men link above, I learned that next year will see a Clash of the Titans remake. As much as I hate moaning about remakes - so predictable, so lacking in historical sense, so selective in its examples - I do feel fairly confident that this one deserves to be stopped by rampaging stop-motion monsters.

Michael Moorcock interview in which we learn that he doesn't read SF, and feels something of the same rage towards the steampunk he helped birth as his mate Alan Moore does towards the grim'n'gritty trend in comics. Bless the old curmudgeon. If nothing else it got me to dig out some more of his End of Time stories - possibly my favourite of his work, given they concern near-omnipotent immortals heavily inspired by the 1890s, who live out Earth's twilight in a round of parties and fads. My people, in other words.

I've already bemoaned the cancellation of Captain Britain and MI:13, but the new issue suggests that it's not even going to go out with its standards intact. By which I mean no slur on the writing or the art, but someone in lettering and/or editorial has let through a 'your' for a 'you're', a 'corps' for 'corpse' and a couple of other, lesser infelicities. Poor show. Phonogram, on the other hand, came through with my favourite issue so far of the second series, because after sweet little Penny and normal Marc, now we have an issue devoted to the first series' Emily Aster, a vain, damaged and in many ways quite annoying young woman. ie, just the kind of person who it's great to have around because she keeps you on your toes - and doubly so in fiction where she's can't really cut loose on you. I'm also left intrigued as to whether, for instance, we'll ever find out what that townie girl was doing at an indie night like Never On A Sunday. Although, I do slightly dispute Emily's test for whether a club's indie (is she more likely to hear a record which sold eight copies in 1977 than whatever's Number One now?). The rules are: if the flyer lists bands - whatever those bands are - then it's an indie club. If it lists DJs, it's a dance club. And if it lists drinks promotions, it's a pop club.