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

"New romantic dark electro post-punk discotheque" Black Plastic returns tonight, after far too long away, and if you're not at Latitude/San Diego/Nuisance, I strongly recommend it. I am certainly in the mood for a dance right now; sometimes even the more assured among us feel everything getting on top of one rather, especially when looking at the bank balance and realising, actually, one is a bit skint. There couldn't have been a better time for Entourage to turn up as a reminder of the crucial mindset: "Something will turn up. It always does." Now, I'm just waiting for my own equivalent to Vince's 'phonecall from Scorsese. There's a couple of jobs I've applied for which look pretty good, but since it's only the pay I object to with this unemployment business, rather than the hours, that Euromillions rollover would go down even better.

Finsbury Park station is having some 'improvement' works on the entrance I normally use, not to do anything practical, just to better the 'ambience'.
Which means getting to the Tube takes me another couple of minutes.
Which means I find it harder to avoid the sort of locals with whom I don't want to associate - couple of days ago there was a bad transvestite (at least, I hope she was a bad transvestite) pushing a wheelchair full of clothes while periodically blowing a whistle, and if I wanted that kind of Royston Vasey crap, I could have stayed in Derby.
Which also means I have to pass the Annoying Billboards. When the Christian Party were campaigning in the elections (and thank heavens that even if the Nazis got in, these scum didn't - they have nearly two millennia extra experience in persecuting Jews and gays), my nearest billboard for them was here. Recently, it's had a tourist board ad with the slogan "everything that makes Mexico magical remains the same" over a picture of an Aztec temple. So, you're saying that Mexico still has human sacrifice? Think I'll pass, thanks. And now, it's ads for one of those religious revival meetings. Though at least it's the one called Dominion. I have no idea whether this differs theologically from any of the similar enterprises, but I first became aware of it coming home the day after a B Movie night at which we'd been dancing to the Sisters song of the same name in an environment guaranteed to blow any evangelical's tiny little mind.
Supposedly the Wells Terrace entrance will be finished by 'mid-July'. Well, I make it mid-July and it doesn't look ready yet.
Elsewhere in the city, Oxford Street is starting to alarm me. There are ever fewer real shops there, ever more fly-by-night places one would expect somewhere far less salubrious, yet still the crowds graze it on some kind of retail autopilot. I was only there to engage in my own little spot of vulture capitalism, checking out Borders which is closing down and promising that everything is half price. Except that everything in certain sections - SF and comics among them - has already been shipped off to surviving branches. Really not the spirit of the thing, is it? Still, afterwards, in Bloomsbury and already half-cut, as one of the second hand shops packed away the outside tables, I was just in time to pluck out an Olaf Stapledon and a Baron Corvo of which I'd never even seen either in the flesh before. Literary acquisition urge cheaply sated, and in a far more civilised environment too.

The latest issue of top zombie despairathon The Walking Dead also contains, at no extra charge, the whole first issue of Chew. In spite of the name, Chew is nothing to do with zombies. You know all those 'cop with gimmick' shows on TV? It's one of those, about a cop who can psychically understand the complete history of anything he eats. Also, there's a moderately amusing satire of the war on drugs in that it's set in a USA where chicken has been banned - except supposedly on account of bird flu, which now looks like total topicality fail. It's moderately amusing. It's by two guys whose names mean nothing to me. And yet it's apparently selling like hot cakes, even to people who are not regular comics readers. And I genuinely have no idea why.
In a different way, DC's Wednesday Comics is a weird one. It's the size of a normal comic when you buy it, but then folds out to broadsheet size - and it's printed on newspaper. I think it's meant to be reminiscent of the 'funny pages' from US papers of yore, but given the closest I ever got to that was the Funday Times, it's a bit lost on me. Still, some of it is charmingly nostalgic stuff, fifties Silver Age stylings without being as badly written - the Supergirl and Green Lantern strips are charming, but best of the bunch is Neil Gaiman returning to the Metamorpho family, albeit with a much lighter touch than we saw in Sandman. Problem is, if this is also aimed at lapsed comics readers, the Superman and Batman strips are real misfires - and the latter is on the front cover. Brian Azzarello has demonstrated before that, while he is quite well aware of the ways in which Batman is a typical noir protagonist, he does not grasp the ways in which Batman differs from them. Same here, and in something otherwise so all-ages, the (admittedly mild) swearing really jars. In the Superman story by no-mark John Arcudi, meanwhile, we get a page in which Superman doesn't do anything super, and then Batman dismissively tells him to get some "super-prozac".

Does anyone else have a Zen Stone MP3 player? Mine is misbehaving slightly, and advice would be welcome.

Never would have expected to attend two clubs on two consecutive nights in 2008 which both played 'Dub Be Good To Me', but it's nice to see Norman Cook's finest hour getting some limelight again after all that Fatboy Slim unpleasantness. Lower The Tone on Friday was, I think, the first time I've ever been to a predominantly lesbian night except for some of the better Stay Beautifuls as against gender-mixed gay nights like Popstarz, Pink Glove &c. Not wishing to stereotype or anything, but I'm not sure I've ever been to such a couply club - however, this was friendly coupledom, not insular coupledom, so it still worked as a club in a way I'm not sure such a couply straight club ever could. Good venue, too, and I'm not just saying that 'cos it's walking distance for me. Though that does help.
And then Poptimism last night, at which katstevens' History of Bosh set caused me to bosh myself half to death and thus remind me why I never go to proper dance music clubs. Ow.

Foolishly, I had hoped that one bulwark against the neo-puritan attack on alohol might be supermarket competition; they'd never be able to impose the sort of rationing they clearly want if they're relying on Tesco and Sainsbury's to share consumer information. Insufficiently devious of me, of course; what do retailers like more than an excuse to set up a cartel? And while the government normally fights (ineffectually) against such behaviour, it's about to hand them a morally sanctioned cartel on a plate when it comes to alcohol. Apparently "the price of alcohol in shops has halved in real terms in 20 years" - by which they mean that it has remained stable. So in our apparently prosperous society, where everything else from bread to fuel bills has been rising at enough of a rate to wipe out any real increase in purchasing power, one thing has failed to keep pace - and it's something which helps people numb the pain of the world our proud masters have made. Clearly that can't be allowed to continue.

Even before they start in with Mad Men tonight, BBC4 continues to come up with odd little gems; Caledonia Dreaming, for instance, a history of Scottish music from Postcard to Franz Ferdinand. They did their best to re-examine some of the less fashionable stuff, but while I was already coming round to The Proclaimers and Deacon Blue, and can now see some merit in Hue & Cry, two of the bands they looked at will always remain beyond the pale: Wet Wet Wet and Teenage Fanclub. Had no idea how involved people like Deacon Blue had been in independence campaigning, either.
Also, the first World of Fantasy (still up on Iplayer, but I'm not linking 'cos it's been misbehaving for me today), on fantasy with child heroes, which gets points for going outside the usual suspects and doing some very good stuff on Alan Garner. Puzzled by the Susan Cooper omission, but maybe the Dark Is Rising film put them off. Which by all accounts would be fair enough.

Just returned from the Bankside 12th Night celebrations - unfortunate that the thing which best gets me in the relevant festive mood is the one marking season's end. It's vastly more popular than last time I went (I think I missed last year), but I still managed half-decent views of the Green Man's arrival and the wassailing, and was in a pretty good position for the mummers' play. There's a nagging sense in my mind of a half-formed connection between this and Popular last night - the Number One single as a British folk tradition, perhaps? - but I don't want to force it. Suffice to say, both were great fun. Highlight of Popular: 'Welcome To The Black Parade' into 'Boom! Shake The Room' (it may have a 100% strict concept, 'God Save The Queen' controversy aside, but how many nights can honestly equal that variety?). Highlight of 12th Night: the blithering arses next to me as the Green Man sails in justify their yapping by noting what I would otherwise have missed - there's a fragment of rainbow in the sky above us, and it's on a curved cloud. In other words - the sky smiled.
Post-mumming, took a look at the Tate's crack. I've seen better. Still, rather that than Catherine Tate's crack.

Don't know why I never got round to seeing Die Hard With A Vengeance sooner, given I love the first two, but the delay has made parts of it queasily prescient. Shots of the twin towers looming as New York is attacked I could have expected, but the real shocker...you know the plan Jeremy Irons and his accents are supposed to be undertaking, to beggar the USA? Dubya's pretty much managed that, hasn't he? And done it all while speaking in almost as silly a voice. Still, with Barack Obama's campaign regaining momentum, for now there's still hope. And in the Andes, two of the USA's hyper-rich are helping to fund an eye on the sky which will not only increase the sum (and accessibility) of human knowledge, but could well save us all from apocalyptic meteor impact. Isn't it odd how the merely super-rich seem content with vulgarity like diamond-studded mobiles and £35,000 cocktails, but the hyper-rich seem to rediscover altruism and vision? See also Warren Buffett.

A pretty quiet week for comics, but there were excellent new issues of Buffy (the first slow, character-centred episode of Whedon's Season Eight, but worth the wait) and Moon Knight. I still don't know what part of writing Entourage has equipped Mark Benson with a knack for brutal vigilante thrillers, but between his Punisher annual and this, I'm impressed. Just a shame about the art. Otherwise, it's Warren Ellis' week; Ultimate Human may not be the obvious title for a series marketing would probably rather have had as Ultimate Hulk Vs Iron Man, but fits the story Ellis has started telling, one of the happier vehicles for his recurrent fascination with the nature of posthumanity. Thunderbolts, on the other hand, is leaving the smart politics aside for the moment and concentrating on insanity, treachery and Venom eating people. Which also works.