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

Went to see the new look Melting Ice Caps on Thursday. Interesting as it was to see a full band performance of David's new songs, talented though his bandmates all are, I hope this doesn't entirely replace the solo, backing track performances. Simply because there are already lots of bands, and there's nobody else doing quite the sort of live shows the Melting Ice Caps were.
(Beforehand, I did all the ironing. As in, all the ironing; for the first time in years, the washing and the weather and what I'd worn lately all converged such that every single thing I have which needs ironing, had been ironed. And then for a moment I thought, it seems a shame to wear a shirt tonight, considering. Except the whole point of having everything ironed is just so that it can be worn, isn't it? There's a moral in that, something about the self-defeating nature of perfection, but I can't quite put my finger on it)

On Friday, Nuisance's first birthday; the nineties night which just barely started in the noughties and has now made the whatever-the-Hells in style, for a given value of the word. And having the Phonogram boys along for the ride worked on So. Many. Levels. Retromancy ahoy. Also, cake. And Babylon Zoo, but let's not talk about that.

Sunday opened with a music swap; this was more successful for me than the equivalent clothes event, because a) there was more than one other male contributor to the pile and b) the contributor gender didn't matter anyway. Got myself a good haul, albeit one which made me look like I was trying a bit too hard to be eclectic given it ran from Manowar and Mastodon albums to a Trembling Blue Stars 7". And then I had to heft my goodies via a slightly more roundabout route than expected (because it turns out there are large stretches of the Regent's Canal you can't walk along, gits) to the regrettably terminal Stag's Head for Fall night. Which confirmed what I'd suspected for a while; my only problem with the Fall is Mark E Smith. Because all three of the bands here, not being fronted by bus station tramps, make Fall songs sound great - especially the Nuns doing the "check the guy's track record" one, whose name I was told at least three times and keep forgetting.

Saturday night: a double bill of bands whose videos I've been in, so I was expecting to get mobbed by Youtube enthusiasts but people just seemed to watch the bands instead. I suppose they are both ace, so fair enough. If further proof were needed, I heard Loyd Grossman tell Brontosaurus Chorus "that was really good" in his actual Loyd Grossman voice. Didn't stick around for his band, though. Watching Loyd Grossman's pub rock band is a bit like shagging the Queen - worth it for the pub anecdote if you've got nothing else on, but if there's another offer you'd enjoy, it's just perverse. Of course, that did also mean missing Mr Solo but hey, it's only a fortnight since I saw him. The Queen-shagging analogy doesn't extend to that bit, I don't think. But off to Don't Stop Moving for pop we went. Whenever I go to two things with music in one night, however varied the remits, there will always be at least one song played at both, and this time it was 'Uptown Top Ranking'. Not the Black Box Recorder version, alas. In between playing 'Identify What The Own-Brand Confectionery Is Imitating' (and usually very well, both as in I guessed them all and they were all indistinguishable in taste from their more famous prototypes) I danced rather a lot, including twice to Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance'. I think that, helped by the Camden Head's pleasingly overpowered soundsystem, I may be on the verge of being worn down/won over.

On Friday I wasn't going to go out because of the storm, but then it hit me - that's precisely the reason to go out, because hearing the great wind batter against the windows is fun but seeing the leaves lashed by air and water, the hurrying shadows from the Fullback's smoking pagoda is so much better. The best moment came when one gust caught a pub table umbrella, sending it pirouetting high into the air - and then plummeting clumsily down the central well, like the suicide of a ballerina attempting one final gesture against gravity. Except obviously I didn't say that at the time, going instead with 'oh my god' followed by 'sack the juggler'.

Thursday was the release party for the new issue of Phonogram, except it's not out yet because of some printing cock-up, but I did end up with an issue anyway. Don't bother trying to follow that. The point is, I think this is my favourite issue of The Singles Club. I said earlier on in the series, and azureskies notes from the other end here, that with this prismatic run of individual experiences of a night, it's not so much about the craft of the comic, because that runs at a consistently high standard; it's about which issues are your experiences, your people, your bands. And of all the music so far (yes, even 'Atomic') my favourite is the Long Blondes. This issue reminds me why, while also reminding me why I took them off my MP3 player - "My life is neither as good or bad as a Long Blondes song, but I have the sense and understanding that perhaps...well, perhaps one day it may be". More so even than the work of Greg Dulli, they are music to do bad things to. And yet after this issue, the first album is back on the MP3 player.
(Also out this week from Gillen and (partially) McKelvie, S.W.O.R.D. which Gillen correctly describes as His Girl Friday in space. Top fun, but I think I may enjoy it even more once the obligatory Dark Reign tie-in is out of the way because for all that it was a timely and smart direction for the Marvel Universe, I am starting to get a leetle tired of it)

The House Beautiful is having the Bathroom Slightly Grotty renovated, which while it's not before time, is mildly inconvenient in the meantime, especially what with me not needing to be at a job during the day or anything because of the whole 'epochal depression' business. Meaning that by the time I'd normally be surfacing in the morning, today I had already showered, dressed and watched Hard Candy. I remember this being much praised at the time - a hard-hitting but thoughtful and taut drama about paedophilia. Mainly, though, I just found myself thinking that now To Catch A Predator does the entrapment bit for real, TV doesn't exactly need this, and that as a two-hander which mostly takes place in one house, it would work much better as a play.
Also, I totally failed to register that the male lead was the guy who played Nite Owl.

The bit of Friday's post which seemed most to interest my public was the bit about buses I chucked in just before posting. So: buses. On Sunday all useful lines out of the area were out, because two had engineering works and some arse had thrown himself under other. Which meant I had to travel for longer than I usually would on a bus fuller than it would usually be. Last window seats available are near the back of the top deck, so I plonk myself down there and hope that the back seat won't then be occupied by some dismal little street gang yawping in second-hand slang. My prayers are answered; instead I get a gaggle of postgrads having an only occasionally infuriating chat about the nature of power. The one arguing that it's always essentially subjective had a surprisingly compelling case.
Clearly my seat of choice on a bus is top deck, front window. Obviously you get the view, but also if you do read, nobody can see that the final issue of Captain Britain & MI:13 has you in tears.
(Also out: the new Phonogram, whose success with the formal experiment of a fixed camera angle is all the more impressive given I just read a much-recommended Luna Brothers comic, The Sword, in which the first issue was cheating horribly with its artist's eye 'camera')

Spent much of the weekend sneezy and ill, so as far as I'm concerned I've now survived swine flu. But not too ill to make despina's lovely wedding, at which one particularly heartwarming sight: a dancefloor on which three generations are happily dancing together to the Prodigy's 'Voodoo People'. The tiny people were generally better behaved that one sees at weddings, in part because they'd been given something to do, wonderful things called Art Jars scattered around the place with toys and craft stuff for them. And for drunk adults, of course: the next day, in addition to their normal contents, my pockets contained:
One small rubber duck
One fortune, hopefully true
One boggly eye
One crayon drawing of a giraffe
One translucent blue pebble

The first man charged under those dubious new 'extreme p0rn' laws is Alan Moore. But thankfully, it's not because the authorities or their masters in the tabloids finally read Lost Girls, just someone else of the same name. In this case at least, the new charge does appear to be there as a safety net, in case he escapes the charge of misbehaviour with a 15-year old - but it's still dangerous to have on the books any legislation which depends so heavily on the good sense of those enforcing it, because you never know when you might get a Mail-reader running a police force.

I've finished Something Fresh, PG Wodehouse's first Blandings story - and yet I don't really feel I got my Blandings fix. Jeeves & Wooster sprang into life fully formed, ditto Psmith; but when first we see Blandings, there's no sign of Gally Threepwood, possibly my favourite Wodehouse character. Worse, there's not one mention of pigs! And while Lord Emsworth's absent-mindedness is the plot's motor, he's not quite the dreamy soul we know from later books; he even gets involved in a spot of gunplay! Dash it all, it's not even high summer, but instead a rather cold spell in spring. It's still Wodehouse, and the man was pretty much incapable of writing a dud, so I shouldn't want to give the impression of complaining; it just comes as a surprise that his world didn't always come to him complete.

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.

Why is half my friendspage posts about moving there? Have the Russian Overlords done something drastic, or is everyone just getting Gadarene on my ass in the spirit of these swinish times?

In other news: watched a bunch of Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes, and every story involved an animal as a crucial player in the crime. I'm now waiting for one in which the murderer is a quail with a blunderbuss.

The new Phonogram: I can see why everyone is getting Best Issue Ever about it, but feel less so, simply because while I can appreciate that it is an astonishingly well-constructed and resonant tale, Marc is essentially a fairly normal chap, and as such, not really like anyone I know. And a large part of why I love Phonogram is that the characters are the sort of people I might easily know.
(Really looking forward to the Mr Logos issue, though, if he gets one. He deserves one)
Gillen's contribution to this week's Dark Reign one-shot, on the other hand, is exactly the sort of thing I'm after, because the utter superciliousness of Namor...well, he's long been a role model of mine, clearly. Except for the (lack of) outfit. Peter Milligan's Loki effort and (surprisingly) Jonathan Hickman's Doom bit also very good, but I still don't really get why everyone loves Matt Fraction, and Rick Remender...well, his name sounds like 'remainder', which always put me off his comics, and this story gives me no reason to reconsider that.

Technically adept types: would it theoretically be possible to make an Oyster card virus?

When I first saw that Virgin 1 was on Freeview, I was mainly excited about The Riches. Then I saw a trailer, and...I'm meant to take that accent of Eddie Izzard's seriously? Like I am Hugh Laurie's in House? There's no punchline? Yeah, maybe not. If I couldn't bear My Fair Lady or The Lady From Shanghai, no way can I take it in an ongoing series. So then I was excited about Battlestar Galactica until I realised it was the crappy original, and while I'd love to see Boston Legal, they've scheduled it against The Sopranos. But just before I dismissed this new channel as a bust, I remembered why I was recognising the name The Unit. It's the collaboration between Shawn "The Shield" Ryan and David Mamet about a US covert ops group (I would say Delta Force except these guys appear to be competent, so maybe think of them just as a US SAS), starring President Palmer from 24 as the operational commander and the T-1000 running things back at base. Tense and manly decisions are made, and stuff blows up. The other plot strand is basically Desperate Housewives except not achingly sh1t, with the unit's wives attempting to maintain both a semblance of normal domestic life, and the pretence that their husbands are in some boring logistics division and certainly not off about to get themselves killed in deniable ops behind enemy lines.
It is on Wednesday evenings. Thus far I have only seen one episode (the second of the first series), but I strongly recommend it.

Phonogram readers and the more-or-less sane will note that everyone interviewed in this piece about the Britpop revival is one of the era's war criminals. Why aren't Menswear touring? Why wasn't the return of Marion met with this sort of mainstream coverage?
(Still, even reading a Northern Uproar interview in 2007 can't be as sure a sign of the End Times as a really rather witty piece appearing in Observer Woman magazine)

Am more excited about Black Plastic later than I've been about a club in a while. I think it helps that this month's cover is the front of John Foxx's Metamatic, an album I somehow only discovered this month.

Well, I know I'm hardly the first to say this but Eurovision 2007 - what an utter debacle. Even after the Eastern bloc vote nobbled Israel and Switzerland in the semifinal, there was still some great stuff on show last night. It was a scandal that The Ark were placed so lowly, obviously, and while Ireland's affair was dismal the line "archipelagic icicles" alone meant it shouldn't have been bottom. France, also, ended up far lower than their sheer camp pop fun-ness merited. But still, y'know - Ukraine and Russia, placed second or third, would both have been legitimate victors. Instead - Serbia. A lumpen woman singing a leaden song. Ghastly. And voted for by all Serbia's former victims! Surely this isn't how the whole local backscratching thing is supposed to work? And in any case, how come the political votes still manifest themselves if everywhere's now deciding it on a 'phone vote by the populace? I don't know anyone who votes for neighbouring countries out of a sense of regional loyalty - do you? Everyone I know just votes for whichever song or performance they like most. Which leaves us two options - either the rest of Europe is significantly more caught up in old tribalisms than us (and in a really confused way, at that) - or the 'phone votes are a sham. I did have my doubts after the year Tatu competed - when in spite of being the only act with a pre-existing British fanbase, we apparently had not enough people voting for them to award them any points, this being announced by the witch Lorraine Kelly who had previously expressed her disapproval of them - but I had taken that for an isolated atrocity. Now, I think we need investigations, tribunals, justice.
Also under the heading 'pop/WTF?' - Bubble Pop Electric. Not so much the music (mostly really good, if rather lacking in flow) as the venue, Studio 88. It could be a nice space if someone gave it a wipe down (Sticky! Also, dead giant bug swimming in the loo) but the staff...not serving any draught even though they had the pumps, in a spot of blatant profiteering. A bouncer who first did nothing and then actually wandered off as a big lairy bloke got confrontational with the guy on the door. Some of the most blatantly underage drinkers I think I've ever seen in London. I'd decided earlier that I was more in the mood for Pop! than goth, hence choosing this over B Movie that night, but the whole experience was far more existentially troubling than any of the men in black ever were.
Which itself reminds me, the final issue of Britpop 'music is magic' comic Phonogram didn't resonate for me quite as much as the earlier issues had. Not through any artistic fault by Gillen or McKelvie, I hasten to add, but because it was about letting go, moving on, coming to terms with one's past...and increasingly I'm not sure about such things. I think we were right as teenagers when we saw growing up as intrinsically a process of surrender and compromise. I think the best we ever manage is to extract some small concessions as we make a peace on the world's terms rather than our own. We all end up giving our 12 points to our own Serbias, and I don't know if it's worse when we do it through gritted teeth or with a Stockholm Syndrome smile.

Am off to Devon for a few days. That's got nothing to do with any of the above, though. Or at least I don't think so.