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

Get Smart amused me - much as the original series did, when that was repeated during my childhood, because in many respects my tastes have not changed much - but even by his own recent standards, Terence Stamp was really 'phoning it in.

As it starts to feel properly autumnal, it's good to have seasonal events as a bulwark against the cold and the dark. Last night was a delayed Hallowe'en ghost walk, and even though I thought I knew the Covent Garden area very well, it's honeycombed with so many alleys I must have passed unwittingly. Half of them have a haunting, and half of those are William Terriss, the spectral version of those celebrity slags who'll turn up for the opening of a crisp packet. And on Friday, darkmarcpi once again hosted a fireworks viewing from his tower, London laid out before us with its competing displays like a happier, sparklier version of Beirut - even if the gas main that was up around the corner was too much of a spoilsport to do its festival bit and join in.

Whenever I've listened to Mitch Benn's 'Proud of the BBC', I've been watching the video, and it's been a heartfelt anthem, a rallying cry. Until Saturday, when I was walking through the dark and heard it for the first time on my headphones. And there, in isolation, it had me on the edge of tears. Especially when my MP3 player's alphabetical play followed it up with Morrissey, and specifically 'Interesting Drug' - "There are some bad people on the rise..." And indeed there are. I worry for the BBC. Hell, I worry for all of us. I was on route to Dalston's Victoria, a local pub full of old black dudes playing dominoes, who seemed bemused rather than upset by the arrival of Bevan 17, their fans and various other bands for a gig in the back room. Odd place, but I like it. Then over to the Lexington for a birthday downstairs, which was the most crowded I've ever seen it, plus occasional visits to Glam Racket upstairs, where the innards of eviscerated Kermits were emulating snowdrifts. The next day was backing vocals for augstone at keith_totp's studio, before which Aug got mistaken for a homeless by one of the cast of Doctors, whom the young ladies were accosting even though he was stood right by the unmolested Victor Lewis-Smith. Young people today. As for the recording itself...well, Bolan recorded there, and Bowie made Scary Monsters, but really it was all just preparation for Sunday. Links will doubtless follow once the beast is unleashed.

In spite of X2 being my favourite superhero film ever, I had an utter absence of plans to go see X-Men Origins: Wolverine - but when a friend invites you along for free, to a cinema that's a pleasant walk away on a nice evening...well, that's a different matter, isn't it? Plus, I was in a position to empathise, given I am currently in the midst of a procedure to bond metal to my skeleton (I have a temporary filling) performed by someone I don't entirely trust (a dentist) and which is likely to affect my memory (she also prescribed me some antibiotics on which I can't drink). And...it's OK. If you want a big dumb action film, or a film with naked Hugh Jackman scenes, I can wholeheartedly recommend it. ( spoilers )
On the way back, I realised that while I'd walked that route home dozens of times, I wasn't sure I'd ever done it sober. And on my MP3 player I was listening to two new loads, added before the antibiotics were prescribed, but which I realised were both by straight edge artists - The Streets' new stuff, and The Melting Ice Caps. Which, sat by the war memorial listening to 'A Good Night', helped reassure me that this week off liquor isn't a chore, it's a novelty. Because frankly, I am better than Duck Phillips.

I read Alfred Bester's Tiger, Tiger* years ago, and didn't really appreciate it; I suspect I may have been too young. Certainly it would have been before my Babylon 5 phase, so while I appreciated that it was the source of the name for Walter Koenig's sinister psychic, I didn't really grasp *why*. Now I'm finally reading The Demolished Man, in which one man attempts to get away with murder in a world where telepaths are a fact of life, and it makes perfect sense. The whole Babylon 5 treatment of psychics, from the oppressive Psi Corps in which they're all obliged to be members, to their interactions with each other and the rest of humanity - it all comes from here. In terms of predicting the future, well, this does so a lot less well than most of its fellows in the (excellent) Masterworks series. But as an evocation of paranoia, and of what telepathy might feel like both for the gifted and the blind, it's astonishing - and the increasingly outlandish stratagems by a killer and a detective who both know the truth, but can't yet act on it, remind me of nothing so much as Death Note. Less sexually charged, though, in spite of one key scene being set at an orgy.
I think I may have been driven to investigate by Michael Chabon mentioning that Howard Chaykin adapted The Demolished Man in his introduction to Chaykin's own American Flagg!. Which, again, I should really have investigated sooner. Deranged pulp futurology, it's the closest I've ever seen an American come to the early days 2000AD, except unlike 2000AD back then, the 'thrill power' here encompasses sex as well as violence, nihilism and insane technology. Something 2000AD has picked up on since, of course - even down to Nikolai Dante appropriating Reuben Flagg's 'Bojemoi!'

*So my father's edition called it, but the battle of the titles seems, in the intervening years, to have been comprehensively decided in favour of its alternative, The Stars My Destination.