alexsarll: (death bears)
Just finished watching the finale of Mad Men season 4, and it continued the season's mix of perfectly played scenes (Peggy and Joan) with baffling developments on the wider screen. I haven't kept track of who's been writing what, but I've often been reminded of the final season of Angel, or what little I saw of latter-day Frasier - the ingredients were all there, but one got the sense that they were being mixed by a teenager with an imperfect grasp of the show's crucial dynamics. If it's true that the Dark Lord Murdoch's hordes are poaching the show from next series...well, I suspect I'll not miss it as much as I once would have done.
Much the same applied to the final episode of the one and only series of Swingtown, another series about the birth of modern America, but there it applied from the start - it was in the nature of a show pitched at HBO which then ended up on network. Plots were too repetitive, resolutions too pat, occasionally the whole thing lapsed almost into sitcom (and even more occasionally it was funny while it did so). And yet, there was stuff that worked. From US networks, that's the most you can expect. From cable, like Mad Men's home at AMC, it should be the least. Never mind from HBO, but their gigolo-com Hung has also been massively uneven in its second series, albeit mostly in the opposite direction - what should be comic instead coming across as merely dramatic. So I suppose I now at least get the patriotic frisson of a month or two where most of my viewing will be UK: Jimmy McGovern's Accused, which as usual with him is preachy but has the actors to get away with it; The Trip, self-indulgence done right; the increasingly geeky/brilliant Misfits; the reliable Peep Show, and its better-than-expected brand extension Robert's Web.

In spite of the snow of which I was so foolishly doubtful in the title of my last post (hence the title of this one), I made it down to Clapham on Tuesday to see [livejournal.com profile] perfectlyvague in Ubu Rex. Which was a quick way to see her in panto, Shakespeare, Sesame Street and Jackass all at the same time. I read the play years back and didn't get the point at all, but on stage, treated with appropriate verve and liberality of interpretation, it's quite something. A sort of grotesque satire on everything as a disguise for simple schoolboy delight in rudeness, or possibly vice versa, with nods to the 'Wild Boys' video which she insists are coincidental.

John Man's Alpha Beta is a book about the alphabet. Not the sort which has a big red picture of an apple, but one about the sheer strangeness of an idea which, unusually, seems only to have occurred once in human history - that 20-40 signs with no intrinsic meanings are enough to get down a whole language. Even languages with no direct connection to the original alphabet seem to have developed one only when they heard reports of the concept - which were apparently enough for the idea to take hold*. And Man follows this idea as it runs rampant, taking in everything from the most abstract concepts - like rhotics, an entire discipline devoted to the study of the letter R - to the spectacular "Thomas Dempster, scholar and hooligan", father of Etruscan studies. "The twenty-fourth of twenty-nine children, and one of triplets, he claimed to have learned the alphabet in a single hour when he was three.""After a duel with a young officer, he had the man held, stripped and bvggered in public by a 'lusty fellow'." His wife Susanna Valeria was "a girl so astoundingly beaiutiful and provocative that she caused Parisians to riot". And so forth. Calmer, but no less intriguing, is the early Korean emperor Sejong, who really was the sort of all-wise and benevolent ruler North Korean propaganda tells them they still have now. But what they do still have is the alphabet he developed, reckoned by connoisseurs to be the best in the world.

*In this connection Man talks briefly about the concept of the meme - which, writing in 2000, he has to explain. He mentions the term's arrival in 1976's The Selfish Gene, and that "When Dawkins came to check out his creation on the Internet some twenty years later, he found over 5000 references". Five thousand whole references to memes on the Internet! Bless.
alexsarll: (Default)
The ever-wonderful BBC4 is currently running a series called In Their Own Words, which is essentially footage and tape of authors talking from 1919 to the present day. Some of them are people one can barely conceive of as existing in a recordable era - so we get GK Chesterton (sadly being a bit racist), HG Wells (sadly being a bit of a useful idiot about Russia), and a snippet of Virginia Woolf (paired with the original Alasatian Cousin joke, and this is a programme the young Morrissey would have loved). Admittedly, in many cases people were only filmed past their prime - hence a puffy-faced old Evelyn Waugh eyeing up his interviewer, calling Woolf and Joyce "gibberish" with a hard G, and Christopher Isherwood who may in his youth have been fit to be played by Michael York and Matt Smith, but in later life comes across more like a sketch comedy character. But still, there's Iris Murdoch intense and strangely charming like one of her own characters*, and Anthony Burgess' improbable hair, and I know I've never read it but how come I never realised that The Lord of the Flies is science fiction? The highlight, in spite of stiff competition from Graham Greene refusing to have his face filmed (he's just a smoking hand on a train through the European night - perfectly Greene) is TH White, even if the voiceover does get the number of sequels to The Sword in the Stone wrong. Sat in a sumptuous room in his Channel Island home, White is complaining about how hard up he is after tall his earnings go to the "farewell state". Replies the interviewer - "But you have a swimming pool. And a Temple of Hadrian."

Magicians stars Mitchell & Webb, and is scripted by Bain & Armstrong. As well as some of the rest of the Peep Show cast, it also features half The Thick of It (notably Peter Capaldi as the prestidigitation world's Simon Cowell), Andrea Riseborough, Jessica Stevenson and even Marek Klang getting to do more than be sexually harassed (which is not something one can say for BBC3's new-look Klang Show). And yet, it's really not very good. How do British TV comedy talents so often manage this when they hit the big screen? And, because I increasingly realise there are no two films between which I wouldn't see a connection if I watched them close together, another 2007 film which turns on fake spiritualist activities - There Will Be Blood. As so often with epic American films, it would have been even better if it hadn't been so self-consciously an epic American film - it's trying that little bit too hard to be Citizen Kane or maybe even the mythical director's cut of The Magnificent Ambersons. But, while it could have stood to lose a half hour or so, Daniel Day-Lewis was every bit as good as I'd been given to understand, and I was pleasantly surprised by the happy ending.

An amusingly convoluted tale from the world of Warhol collecting, where the decisions of a shadowy and unaccountable organisation can transform a work's worth overnight from hundreds of thousands to pretty much zero. But since anybody interested in the 'authenticity' of a Warhol work is a moron and/or only in art collecting for the money, their suffering is funny.

*I just finished The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, which reminded me quite how underappreciated she is as a writer of genuine horror - most every book of hers hasone scene which leaves you shuddering for days.
alexsarll: (Default)
On Wednesday I went to Catch, which has changed a lot in the past few years, to see a show headlined by Tim Ten Yen, who hasn't. The bill also featured a band called Hot Beds, who had a song about how Christmas now starts in October which worked both as a critique of festival creep and a big overwrought festive ballad which they can get away with playing outside December because it's about precisely that. Good work. I was, however, primarily there for the 18 Carat Love Affair who, as well as the usual delights, deployed a top hat and ace new track 'Dominoes'.
Catch might not be quite as typically, terribly East London as it used to be, but Friday found me in an even more atypical East London venue, in that it was seven storeys up (I think that's even higher than Collide-A-Scope) and done up like some kind of voodoo surf kitchen. Even before I started drinking, I saw a pink elephant trot past; fortunately, investigation confirmed that others could see it too and it was in fact a small child wearing a pink elephant head. Probably. It says a lot about The Deptford Beach Babes that they find places like this to play. That's a compliment, by the way.

As Peep Show bows out (and was this series the best extended advertisement for contraception ever aired?*), the comedy baton is handed over and The Thick of It returns. The new choice of minister interests me; Chris Langham having been, shall we say, rather too open-minded about acceptable sexual behaviour, they've this time opted for Rebecca Front, who if anything has the opposite problem; we should probably expect a Jan Moir cameo before season's end.

"Parents who think the new film of Maurice Sendak's picture book Where the Wild Things Are is too frightening for children can "go to hell", the author has said." It's a long time since I read the book, I'm not sure if I'm even that bothered about the film, but this piece gives me massive respect for the man.

Like most people, my first Nabokov was Lolita; for my second I took a recommendation and tried Despair, which almost finished him for me, but last week I finally had a third try and plumped for Pale Fire and, well, he's not a one-hit wonder. sufficiently pretentious that I felt a cut was in order )
Also, the last king of Kinbote's distant homeland, Zembla, is called Charles Xavier. The book came out one year before the debut of the X-Men, but somehow I can't picture Stan or Jack coping with Nabokov's prose.

*Though I have just found the perfect childcare solution.
**Well, the third canto has some moments of beauty, but otherwise we're in the authentically bathetic territory of the sort of sub-Frost American poet who gets good reviews of their collected works in the Guardian, but in which reviews the quoted excerpts convince you never, ever to read any of the work in question.
***OK, there's Angie Bowie's autobiography, but even that involved a ghostwriter whom I suspect of setting her up for a fall. Certainly, spending that much time in her company would make me want to do the same.
alexsarll: (bernard)
Even though I didn't stay quite to the end, Friday's Black Plastic felt epic. I think this may have had something to do with listening to the Afghan Whigs on the way there (and then not getting horribly lost because this time, dudes, I remembered to check the full address). Possibly the drunkest I have been...since the creepers incident, in fact. Earlier that day I had climbed my first tree since then - one which had creepers, creepers I carefully avoided. Because my back is fine now, and as soon as possible you've got to get back on the horse. Or tree. But not back in the tree on a horse, that's a guaranteed recipe for disaster.

On Saturday, I felt somewhat puzzled by the Guardian having a big article about Momus and giving Gyratory System, whose free show I am attending on Wednesday, Single of the Week. I also watched the new Peep Show which, if it felt like it was moving a little fast at times both for comedy (surely there was an episode's worth of laughs in Mark as the boss?) and plausibility (could a multinational cut the British office loose with such disregard for redundancy laws?), was still Peep Show, and thus a sign of life in British comedy, which I needed. First, I'd recently attempted Home Time based on a smattering of good previews - but even being able so easily to identify with the premise (getting 'round 30 and London life hasn't entirely gone to plan), I was unable to overlook the unfortunate issue that it really wasn't very good. And prior to Entourage on Thursday I caught a little Katy Brand. Katy Brand's Big-Ass Show is very much like the smell of vomit, in that while you know and remember that it is bad, a first-hand encounter always reminds you that it is far, far worse than contentment has enabled you to remember. What Paul Kaye and her from The IT Crowd are doing in it, I don't know. Couldn't they have got more fulfilling work, like advertising formula milk to Third World mothers, or peddling their arses on street corners?
Then out again for what I had thought would be a walk through the park (albeit under apocalyptic skies) to a cheap pub where we'd settle in for a while, but was in fact a pub crawl. I'm generally sceptical of pub crawls, especially ones which take place on a Saturday night, in the West End, in the rain, without the full addresses of certain key pubs. But, once we settled in at the Bear and Staff, a good evening. Not least because quite by chance my table gave me a perfect view of all the passing hen parties. Odd observation: without exception, the most attractive members of any West End hen party are within the first third as they go along the street. Shock troops, I suppose.
More importantly, I also made a glittery conker, and called him Glittery Conker, for reasons I hope are obvious.

Yesterday I teetered over to Green Lanes, which was closed for a free festival - ostensibly a food festival but I think demand had surprised them, although I did have one rather lovely Turkish honey ball (your innuendo here). Caught a couple of Irish bands too, one of whom entertained me by covering 'Anarchy in the UK' for a family audience, at an event sponsored by local businesses and attended by councillors and MPs. The speed of assimilation accelerates such that I'm convinced Rammstein's new video (actual p0rn, if you didn't know) will be on ToTP2 within ten years. Then home where I ended up watching Beerfest, which as expected is not on a par with Seth Rogen or Will Ferrell films, but as bandwagon-jumping goes, isn't too bad either.

Finally, these bats are adorable.
alexsarll: (magneto)
I've not been to a zoo since I was a tiny, and dimly remember them as a bit of a dispiriting experience. But having finally visited London Zoo, the vast majority of the animals there seemed reassuringly happy, or at worst indolent rather than stressed; animals from the park next door were also showing a vote of confidence, with their heron coming to hang out with the zoo's penguins (whose most prolific egg-layer is called Stuart), and pigeons sat in the okapis' feed trough. They also have what could easily feel like an excessive amount of monkeys, if monkeys weren't so awesome (especially the tamarin which made an escape effort it hadn't really thought through). Plus butterflies! Burrowing owls! And an ibis, which I recognised because it had the same shaped-head as Thoth. Much the same sort of set-up as they used in the new series of Primeval, in fact, except that here the animal-looking-like-an-Egyptian-god thing seemed to be a bit more of an effort to re-angle the series towards dinosaurs-as-source-of-myths - presumably a focus group told them that they needed a bit of mysticism in with the (pseudo)science. It's a shame, they seem to be retooling too many things at once and not really getting any of them right yet; the chemistry's off with Steven gone, the new young male lead is astonishingly blank, and Cutter's new hair is just wrong. I fear the Curse of ITV could have claimed their last decent terrestrial show.
(Not entirely convinced by the Skins finale either. Super Hans as a parent? Dear heavens)

In top North London news, "Much-missed Islington venue The Garage is to be re-opened after a not inconsiderable refurb in June this year, as part of MAMA Group and HMV's previously reported joint venture, which is operating under the Mean Fiddler name in corporate terms, but which brings the HMV brand into the live space as far as the sign above the door is concerned." Let's hope it won't have lost all its old charm in the branding frenzy - that used to be one of my favourite venues. Or two if you count Upstairs.

Oh, and anyone who's somehow managed not to watch The Wire yet and wants to see what all the fuss is about - it starts on BBC2 tonight. I thought that the model of pay TV shows turning up on terrestrial a bit later was dead in the age of the DVD box set, but apparently not; there's an episode per week-night for the next three months.
alexsarll: (bernard)
Skins is set at the outset of sexual life, the Peter O'Toole film Venus at its end. But watching the two back to back on Thursday night, it was the correspondences I could see. Yes, that episode was largely Election with added Father Dougal, Art Brut and teenage sapphism, but it was also about the stupid, humiliating things the bewitched will do for beauty (shorn of the gender stereotyping Hanif Kureishi either displays, or allows his lead to display, in Venus, where O'Toole's Maurice suggests that while a naked woman is the most beautiful thing most men will ever see, for women it's their first child). And while the Freddy/Cook/JJ plotline was sidelined this Skins, you see that same sense of toxic male friendship in Venus when Maurice and his old muckers meet in the cafe each day, Maurice still trying it on with people his chums consider off-limits just like Cook would. Albeit with considerably more charm, obviously, because Maurice is Peter O'bloody Toole, isn't he? Pretty much playing himself, with admirable self-awareness (an actor who has cornered the market in corpses); beyond that, playing the himself he played in Russell T Davies' Casanova, the old roue not quite prepared to admit that the game is over and Time won.
(Speaking of Time - Peep Show being a comedy of my generation, how terrifying to see its love object, tarnished as she may there be, now playing the mother of a teenage lead character in Skins)
alexsarll: (magneto)
The Dark Knight is not, contra IMDB, the best film ever (but then look what they've got at #2 - ugh!). It's not even the best film about a non-powered billionaire playboy superhero released this year - Robert Downey Jr is Stark is Iron Man, whereas Christian Bale, though he plays a brilliant Bruce Wayne, only in the car chase and the climactic fight ever convinced me he was Batman, as opposed to just a guy in a Batman suit. It is, however, bloody good. All this talk of a posthumous Oscar for Heath Ledger - well, I'd approve, obviously, because it'd be an Oscar going to a frakking SUPERVILLAIN as against some sententious middlebrow issue movie, and because his death-by-Method would really raise the bar next time Tom Hanks or similar git wants a cheap win by playing a retard - "No, sorry Tom, these days that would actually require you to suffer severe brain damage". Well, I'd be happy to help 'coach' him with an iron bar...but I digress. Heath Ledger plays a damn fine Joker, drawing on both 'The Killing Joke' and Arkham Asylum and managing that rare feat of actually making him *funny*, as against a Stalin whose crap jokes you laugh at because otherwise he'll kill you. But this is not his film, it's Aaron Eckhart's; this is Harvey Dent's story and he plays a better Dent than I think I ever saw the comics manage.
minor spoilers )

Went to have a look at Burne-Jones' Sleep of Arthur in Avalon at the Tate yesterday. Obviously he's my King in a way no Windsor could ever be, but I was still reminded that Burne-Jones is really not my favourite pre-Raphaelite; this painting is acknowledged unfinished, but set against Rossetti or Millais or Waterhouse (as he is in the Tate) his works all look a little that way, lacking some final glaze - or the breath of life - to really give that great pre-Raphaelite impression of being a glance though some charmed casement into faerie.
(They've also got Flaming June in from the same lender - both the paintings are in the free access areas so if you're a fan, drop in, but be warned their lighting is still atrocious, reflection and glint all over the place. Also, there's some asinine Martin Creed conceptual piece going on next door which as so often, is based on an OK idea but not really thought through)

Club night becomes religion to dodge anti-flyering byelaw.

I didn't even know there was a film adaptation of Jan Potocki's Manuscript found in Saragossa until I saw the DVD at my parents'; they had never heard of the book and had just had the DVD pressed on them by a friend. Neil Gaiman summarises the book better than I could; the film manages a remarkably full and faithful adaptation of this bizarre mish-mash of a book, getting the Goya-style chills and the absurdist sitcom in there as close as can be. Apparently lead actor Zbigniew Cybulski was considered 'Poland's James Dean' - which shows you how bad things must have been behind the Iron Curtain, 'cos to me he's more Brendan Fraser meets David Mitchell. Fortunately, that's just what you want in Alphonse van Worden.
alexsarll: (crest)
Spent the first half-hour or so of Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull not really feeling it; the fifties colour was laid on too heavily, the conviction seemed lacking...it felt like watching a tribute act. A good tribute act, sure, but not the real thing. And it didn't help having Ray Winstone along; it really was just that one role as Beowulf where I liked him, although I guess here he was playing a venal berk rather than anyone we were meant to respect. But then there's that map/'plane bit one always needs in an Indy film, and we're in the jungle, and yes, it all fits into place. I stay on the edge of my seat for the rest of the film, except when I'm cracking up at the sheer audacity of it all. I'm not entirely sure I'd want a fifth but yes, this is a worthy addition to the series.

On Saturday the song 'Jolene' became linked in my head to Joe Lean of rubbish indie combo Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong, aka Sophie's brother in Peep Show. I have not yet been able to decouple them, so I might as well share the misery.

The Guardian's redesigned Review section announces "Starting next week...52 - a novel in weekly instalments by Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, AM Homes and Jackie Kay". A novel called 52, in weekly instalments, with four authors? What a terribly original idea.
(Although, one strand of the first 52 did concern two lesbian lovers hounded by an evil religion, so Winterson at least would have been right at home)

Now if you'll excuse me I need to get some breakfast, clean out my cupboard and watch the season finale of Mad Men. I'm glad that the weather is not of a sort to make me feel like these are bad uses of my bank holiday.
alexsarll: (seal)
There was a lot to love in 'The Poison Sky: Cut for spoilers because apparently some people might be foolhardy enough to check their flist before iPlayer )

Similarly, I'm not sure why I didn't like this week's Peep Show more than I did. It's not that I'm hard to please at the moment, I don't think - [livejournal.com profile] moleintheground left his Viz in the pub t'other night (I'll give it you back at bowling, Ed) and there was a strip I'd heard of but not seen before, 'The Drunken Bakers', which was utterly brilliant.

Poptimism last night - Woo! and Yay! and 'Guy Debord Is Really Dead!', but dear heavens the Cross Kings' new murals are a disgrace.
alexsarll: (bernard)
Some further thoughts on Doctor Who:
On Sunday, the top of the up escalator at Bermondsey station was doing the Sound of Drums...diggerdydum, diggerdydum, diggerdydum...
Never mind getting Widdecombe to endorse Saxon - they should do a whole episode with Lembit Opik as himself, teaming up with the Doctor to avert some asteroid-related threat. I'm sure he'd be up for it.
The design of the Citadel confirmed me in my suspicion that Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars was a significant influence on the portrayal of Gallifrey.
I really hope they at least leave enough unsaid about the Paradox machine that unreconstructed geeks such as myself can tie it in to the marvellous Faction Paradox lunacy of the books.

It was bad enough having Johnson from Peep Show in Hyde, but now Super Hans is working for him! It's a grand week for TV, though, isn't it? This and Who, two episodes of Rome, and on Friday, the return of The Shield, the one other cop show which, if not The Wire's equal (what is?), can at least look it in the eye. Oh, and last night BBC4 decided, for some opaque and unguessable reason, to show the delightful Yes, Minister special in which Jim Hacker ascends, unopposed, to Prime Ministership, following it with a documentary about ex-PMs. The most remarkable detail of this was how much enhanced John Major looks nowadays; he's more charismatic, happier, the voice less nasal, even the upper lip less offputting. The voiceover concluded that every PM, secretly, would love to return to running the show, but in everything Major said, every twinkle in his eye, you could tell that he really wouldn't. He's been there, done that, and concluded that he really does much prefer the cricket.

I am otherwise musing on the peculiar obscurity of Weird Al Yankovic's UHF (which really should be considered in the mainstream of eighties American teen comedies, rather than as a cult oddity), the sheer manliness of Glengarry Glen Ross (arguably even more male than Conan the Barbarian, the otherwise unchallenged champion), and the utter Englishness of W.Somerset Maugham selling his soul to Aleister Crowley for worldly success, and then grudging him £50 once Crowley was on his uppers.
alexsarll: (Default)
Every time there's a Soul Mole it's ace and I wish it were more often, before remembering that if it were it wouldn't be such a guaranteed-to-get-everyone-out Event, and shutting up. So, that. Pity that, between T-Mobile types and licensing, we didn't get more use out of the balcony, but while I was out there I did see the thoroughly Islington sight of certain members of the parish downing the last of their travelling booze - and then recycling the bottles. Bit more ventilation and some pints and I could really love that venue; meanwhile, it's still pretty good.

Peep Show may have had a patchy fourth series but oh my, it came right in the finale. One of their best episodes ever, I think. Wishing neither to spoiler anyone, nor just end up quoting the whole thing, I shall restrain myself to saying that I don't think I've seen quite such arc-based storytelling in a sitcom since Spaced; the use of little elements from the prior episodes was nicely done even where those episodes themselves hadn't been great.

That aside, am still puzzled as to why the tracklisting on my Gang Starr best-of bears no relation to the actual order of the tracks, but otherwise content. Oh, and it's Nashville-on-Thames at the Buffalo Bar tomorrow - complete with Darren from Hefner in the live bluegrass act!
alexsarll: (bernard)
Have finally seen the film Nick Cave scripted, The Proposition. As I had been led to expect, Australia's wilderness had been filmed impeccably, forming a perfect setting for a typically Biblical Cave story (as in one of the bits of the Bible whose story is primal and powerful more than it conveys anything which even the loopiest fundamentalist could take as a moral lession). However, like every film I have ever seen to feature Ray Winstone, it would be significantly improved by the removal of Ray Winstone.
Some other actors who would have given a better performance as Captain Stanley:
Lance Henriksen
Michael Chiklis
Pierce Brosnan
Jack Davenport*
Nick Cave himself
Edward James Olmos
Michael Caine
Damn near anyone except Ray cocking Winstone.

Which makes it rather a shame that the one piece of casting already done for the next Hillcoat/Cave film, Death of a Ladies' Man, is...Ray sodding Winstone.

Taking the evidence of the new Mitchell & Webb radio sitcom pilot, 'Daydream Believers', in conjunction with the patchy current series of Peep Show, they've finally stretched themselves too thin. I suppose most everyone does in the end.
(Speaking of Peep Show - that ad shown during Friday's episode, in which a fairly attractive girl is in the bar with her own drunker self, and the tagline "Make sure you like what you see"? It's intended as an alcohol awareness thing, but I kept expecting it to turn into a variant on the Buffy episode where Evil Willow's after the normal, not-yet-gay one)

In one of yesterday's bowling matches I was, in third place, the highest-ranking male. Which I'm sure must say something vital and current about the obsolescence of gender stereotypes, though its wider applicability is perhaps doubtful.

*This option also playing up the Pirates of the Caribbean resonance the story already possesses.
alexsarll: (Default)
Blades of Glory is a Will Ferrell comedy, so it should go without saying that it's vastly better than most films out there. And yet...it's not quite right. The dynamic is out somehow, though I couldn't tell you just how. At one point around the middle, I even started to think it was sagging. Perhaps I'm just in a hypercritical mood when it comes to comedy this weekend, because I also found one strand of last night's Peep Show plot unusually implausible.
Blades was, however, preceded by the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Though I enjoyed Dead Man's Chest more than a lot of people seemed to, for some reason the imminent arrival of the conclusion hadn't intruded too far on my consciousness. It would be fair to say that the trailer has changed that; it looks like they've given the story exactly the finale it needed, and now I can't wait.

Though not battling a plan to meet in a Leicester Square pub called Waxy O'Connor's on a Friday night, you can guess even from that bare description why I didn't have high hopes for the venue. But the drinks were only averagely ridiculous in price, the crowding less than one might easily expect, and the music an acceptable selection of the indie everyone likes, played at a volume sufficient to feel lively but easy to talk over. The crowd, though initially looking to be heavy on the townies, turned out to include representatives of most of London's tribes, apparently boozing in harmony, And the space itself - it feels like a sort of cavern network, and the room we were in had a tree towering over us, feeling like it might be holding up London. It reminded me of one of the better scenes in Stickleback, and that the West End is not quite a lost cause.

I've finished Burgo Partridge's endearingly batty History of Orgies. When I complain that non-fiction dates too easily, it's only really an objection to modern stuff - who wants to read a book prognosticating from the perspective of two years ago? It's pointless. But let them ferment a little longer and you get, as here, a perspective on the time of the writing as well as the times written about, fifties erudition woven in with the debaucheries of the ancients (and earlier moderns). Intriguingly, though a peripheral Bloomsburyite Burgo only appears to have a Wikipedia entry in Spanish. If you search him in English you get an article about his uncle and a list of dog breeds sandwiching the piece on group sex - which itself has "[citation needed]" after several statements of the blindingly obvious. It may be an incredibly handy resource, but it should never be forgotten that Wikipedia can also be extremely annoying.
alexsarll: (crest)
I'm doing a bit of DJing early on at Feeling Gloomy later, but please don't let that dissuade you from coming down to check out the newer, shinier Luxembourg and all the other attractions.

Peep Show just gets more painful every time, doesn't it? Meanwhile, I only tried watching Roman's Empire because I used to vaguely know the lead back in the midlands; as such, I was a little jarred to find one scene filmed on my London road, out front of Rowan's. It's not a *bad* programme, but nor does it quite seem to gel, even with a good supporting cast including Nathan Barley and Roy from The IT Crowd.
One comedy which definitely doesn't live up to its early promise: Mike Judge's Office Space. After starting off with ten painfully accurate minutes which are almost too The Office to be fun, the real laughs ensue: our hero is left under hypnosis with no guilt or inhibitions, and stops giving even the semblance of a toss at work. Yes!, you think, This Is The Stuff! But then, like far too many US comedies, it starts pandering to conventional sentiments. Having established, very sensibly, that *all* work is rubbish, it pulls back, falters, flakes out. The scheme to rip off the employers (who sorely deserve it) falls apart for no particular reason. Our Hero's hypnosis starts wearing off, again for no particular reason. Convention is restored, normality asserted, the status quo survives. What looked so promising a denunciation of all work ends with a cliched paean to the dignity of manual labour. It's a terrible, middlebrow waste of what started so anarchically well. It's like when Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead veers away from the hijinks which should ensue and instead forces the oldest kid to get a job. Oh well, perhaps I was a fool ever to hope for greatness from any film where Jennifer Blandiston is the unattainable object of desire.

White Mischief last night had enough that was splendid to do great credit to a first attempt. Evil Genius were their usual charmingly demonic selves, and Flipron filled the bigger space as effortlessly as they do the smaller venues in which I've seen them before. True, Tuesday Weld were rather let down by Stephen's voice and poise not being up to the usual standards (he may just have been ill), and I'm afraid Kunta Kinte are no Catch - the Laurel Collective do this sort of thing much better (though Toby still only looks about 16, so it's not as if he's got no time to pull it all back together). The vast majority of the crowd had made an impressive effort, and the space was almost right, but I fear Conway Hall just doesn't have the edge of darkness which would suit a night like this - nor does it help having a Polonius quote over the stage (silly humanists). The most astounding entertainment I've seen in quite some time, though, was The Great Voltini. Several wise men and women of this parish having concluded, some time ago, that the mark of a great pop video was fire and/or breasts - last night I saw a fire started with a breast. Is this where the young folk would say 'FTW'?

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