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

Still reeling from John Crowley's 'Great Work of Time'* when I headed out yesterday, not quite into the past but into a nineties night. Some quibbles over what counted as Britpop, but Hell, they made better My Life Story selections than My Life Story did on Thursday. And Spearmint! Younger Younger 28s! The really rubbish stuff like OCS for which I fled the stage but it wouldn't have been the same without it! I do hope they have another one soon, I like pretending I'm still young.
(Though I'm convinced my Geneva t-shirt slowed down my service in the pubs beforehand, presumably because I looked like a tourist or a footballist rather than because London's barstaff are all still bitter about the second album)

Weird watching Near Dark again post-Heroes, seeing Nathan Petrelli as a hot young cowboy. Or after Big Love, given I now think of Bill Paxton as Mormon paterfamilias rather than a punky vampire. Lance Henriksen, though - well, I don't think I've seen him in any new roles since I first saw this, and I think he came out of the womb looking like that. It does remind me that at some point I should watch more Millennium, though - another good show screwed over by UK schedulers, just as I note Entourage, having been pushed back and back in the schedules lately and losing its repeat, is now disappearing mid-season (over christmas? We don't know, the continuity announcer was waffling on about unconnected programmes rather than telling us when this one would be back) lest it show up the rest of ITV's output as the dross it is.
But yes, Near Dark. Stands up very well, on the whole, aside from the sappy undercurrent of the family plot. And I don't think I noticed the first time I saw it that it doesn't once use the V-word.

Another V-word: Vegemite. I may have mentioned before how the health food shop where I normally get it is hopeless, only ever getting two pots at a time and almost always selling out before resupply, when it's not as if this is a perishable item. Well, Tesco now has whole trays of the stuff, and for about half the price, while also being much more convenient for me. Note to small local shops: the reason supermarkets are massacring you is that they don't suck.
(Similarly, even though I prefer to do my christmas shopping in the flesh - in the (apparently forlorn) hope that it might get me into the festive spirit - when I'm looking for a pretty recent, pretty big SF book, and one big central London bookshop doesn't have it at all, and another only has a slightly knackered copy, and I'm being sent vouchers to discount it online where it is already cheaper than in the physical shops, well then yes, I'm going to buy it online, aren't I?)

*"I have seen the real world gradually replaced by this other, nightmare world, which everyone else assumes is real"? I can sympathise with that. I wasn't going to buy a paper yesterday - I didn't need the TV listings, I've got a Radio Times. Should have stuck to the plan.
ETA: and with that thought fresh in mind, what should I find but a plug for a pseudoscientific modern restatement of 'everything for the best in this best of all possible worlds'. Note to self: never underestimate the human desire for consoling lies, even ones that absurd.

"If we want our kids and our friends' kids to have somewhere to live that's of a decent standard" then the answer has nothing to do with building more houses, on the green belt or otherwhere. It has to do with curbing the buy-to-let explosion. Apart from anything else, unless there's a change in the law and the tax breaks then all those new homes are just going to be bought up by investors like the extant ones are. So all you'll accomplish is destroying what little open space remains on this overbuilt island and making the rich richer. And meanwhile, a senior cop wants to ban having a drink in the park of a summer afternoon as a strike against teen disorder - having apparently failed to notice that there already exist laws against the disorderly acts themselves. So, given a certain element of society is breaking the current laws with no fear of the consequences, they'll do likewise with this one - while the people who aren't currently causing anyone a problem, in part because of an ingrained reluctance to break the law, will be denied yet another of life's simple pleasures. I mean, seriously, how can anyone fail to spot these jaw-crumblingly obvious correspondences? Are they all really that stupid?
...And this is why I've not been updating a great deal lately. When I'm reasonably content, I see no particular angle from which I could write much more than "I watched Bad Boys. Stuff blew up. It was fun" or "I went to the park and drank some pink wine. This made me happy". And when I'm not in a good mood...well, OK, sometimes it's in-between. Sometimes I have vague musings on a topic of possible interest. But then I check myself and ask, am I actually about to say anything new, or would it just be posting for the sake of posting? Sure, pretty much any half-formed thought which manages to survive its first five seconds in my brain will be of more intellectual merit than, oooh, 95% of the stuff posted to the Guardian blogs, but that is not in itself a sufficient qualification for existence. But beyond the musings comes the rage, and the internet is not exactly short of splenetic rants either, is it? If I were being paid to do a weekly column on What Really Grinds My Gears, sorted. Hell, I wouldn't find a daily one too taxing either. Or even hourly so long as I could file in advance...but I'm not. I'm on my own time. And the sheer amount of stuff that pisses me off is beginning to alarm me. I mean, yes, I know I've said in the past that I'm hoping to muster enough pure hate that I can channel it as beams of destructive energy, but when you think about it, running omega beams off an internal power source never did Darkseid much good, did it? And that line in BBC4's Cantor documentary where the shrink noted that schizophrenic breakdown was often preceded by "looking too hard at the world...a rigidity of perceptual stance" felt far too close to home. So I've once more become a little captivated by that Franz Ferdinand line from 'Matinee', where he's on about all the things he hates and "you smile, mention something that you'd like, how you'd have a happy life if you did the things you like". Lately there was this spider on the outside of my kitchen window and I thought, he's still, maybe if I just look at the web instead of the spider? It's a lovely pattern, a startling feat of construction, almost mandala-like. And it worked, for a little while. But then last night, I come in and he's moving - the way they move being what gets me with spiders, it's like the sound of metal on metal, goes right through me. But I try to calm it down, manage. Then back in again later - and now he's eating, giving me the full Shelob revulsion/terror/killer instinct reaction, and there are limits, and I have a decent sized book in my hand. If I am to be redeemed, it will not be by that road.

Against which...well, the My Life Story B-sides and rarities album finally arrived. As with Suede's Sci-Fi Lullabies, it is marred by being incomplete, and incomplete in odd ways - it includes plenty of the later ones nobody was much bothered about, utterly superfluous demos, and far too many takes on bloody 'Emerald Green', while omitting (among others) the marvellous 'Sir Richard Steele'. And even the good tracks...they never quite captured their magic on tape, did My Life Story. The CDs were always reminders of the live show, because live they were magic. Literally, and yes I do know what that word means - I saw them transform Derby's dingy square into a plaza on Roxyworld.
See? Even when I'm trying to be happy, it goes this way. For the moment, at least - over and out.