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

The reason I didn't get straight online to share my thoughts with the interweb...well, yes, I was also busy on some hard-fought games of Othello with the parents, but beyond that, I simply don't know what to make of it. The first time since the comeback we've had a named Part One and Part Two on TV, and fair enough because it's just too soon to say. I could have done without the Matrix bits, I guessed what "they are coming back" meant as soon as I heard it on the trailers, but the key Being John Simm stuff - I don't know yet whether that was good or not. I have invites for NYD which I may decline simply because I cannot wait one second longer than I need to before finding out where this all goes. Curse you, RTD, you glorious bastard.

In other news, I've finally caught up with Alan Moore's new 'underground' paper Dodgem Logic and...well, the articles by Moore, Graham Linehan and Josie Long are pretty entertaining, as you'd expect, if not any of their best work. The contributors you've not heard of mainly make clear why you've not heard of them; there's a lot of the sort of kneejerk hippy claptrap which eventually saw me lose patience with The Idler, the worst being the Lejome Pindling screed which rehearses the tired old complaints about 'manufactured pop'. Pindling loftily pronounces that Lady Gaga's "lyrical content is trash at best"; I suppose at least that quote is literate (if inane), which is more than can be said for most of his piece. Later he declares "The majority of albums I listen to nowadays have 2 tracks which I would consider good and a further 12 which I would say are questionable", unaware that he is himself one of those filler tracks. In between is the local content, one piece again by Moore, which I almost compared to a Northampton version of the less good bits of the capital's delightful Smoke before realising how unfair that would be. All Moore's previous Northampton work - and presumably his novel-in-progress, Jerusalem, have found the same wonder and strangeness in the town which most other psychogeographers can so much more easily pick up in London. Here, he and his collaborators are just taking the simple route and showing provincial Britain as a denatured, grotty dump. I'll give it another issue or two to settle in, clearly, but I really expect more from Moore.

And is it just me (and my family, in rare consensus) or would Wall-E have been a better film if it were half an hour shorter?

The main reason I don't walk all the way into town more often is that I've never found a route I liked - until now. Setting off early for hoshuteki's birthday, I started off through the Gillespie Park walk by the railway*, where I was able to verify that I am in fact faster than a speeding locomotive if by 'speeding' we mean 'being held between Finsbury Park and Drayton Park to regulate the service". Then through somnolent Drayton Park to Highbury, right off Liverpool Road and slide through the leafy squares of Barnsbury; this has all felt like Arthur Machen territory but once you skip over the brief busy patch of King's Cross you hit the motherlode, the little streets off the Gray's Inn Road. And there you are, in Bloomsbury, which I realise I now think of as the heart of town.

publicansdecoy and obsessive_katy got married this weekend, which is lovely and all, ditto setting aside a dedicated 'raucous drunks' table at the dinner (yes, obviously I was on it), but the masterstroke was having the wedding in a zoo! With a snow leopard and pygmy hippos and "one of the world's most mysterious mammals, the Fosca"**. Also a toastmaster, which I am now contemplating as a future career since it appears to consist of getting drunk in a tailcoat at strangers' weddings and perving on the bride. And the Black Plastic DJs. More weddings like this, please. The day was only slightly marred by the journey home, on which I had a full and frank exchange of views with a fellow who felt that throwing a pastie in my face was fair comment given I have a big nose.

Sunday, alas, began for me with the news of two Doctor Who deaths - seventies producer Barry Letts and 'Horror of Glam Rock' guest star Stephen Gately. Very sad. Mostly spent the rest of the day reading, though I did take a brief walk around the park at dusk and found myself terrified by the skies, in which the advancing mountain ranges of cloud seemed to presage apocalypse rather than the lovely clear day we've got today. I did attempt to watch Ghost Rider (or as they call it in the Philippines, Spirited Racer) and...well, it does a lot of things right. Given how Peter Fonda comes across these days, and Easy Rider, casting him as the Devil in a film about motorbikes is brilliant. And the narrator from Big Lebowski as the gravedigger who explains the plot and is blatantly a previous rider, great decision. But...in the lead, Nicolas Cage. Who as has been the case for a decade plus now, is just annoying, and can't convey any emotion bar 'faintly amusing hangdog puzzlement'. And even when, after 50 minutes, he eventually turns into the Ghost Rider, you realise that while modern special effects can do a lot of things, having as the lead character a guy with a flaming skull for a head is still slightly beyond them. On the printed page it looks great, the image makes instant sense. On screen...nothing quite looks right about it.
So I turned over to watch the Pixar documentary instead. And bless them, what lovely guys they all seem to be. Tying back to Ghost Rider, it also makes me feel I was right not to worry about the Disney takeover of Marvel, because while it is very clear from what the Pixar people say that Disney did lose its way for a while and insist on churning out bland crap, it also seems clear that, with John Lasseter now in overall charge of the creative side at Disney as well as Pixar, and having kicked out all the execs who weren't creatives, Marvel will be in good hands.
And though I still have no great desire to see Up (possibly because it's directed by the same guy as Monsters Inc, my least favourite of the Pixars I've seen), I do now really want to see Wall-E. Could anyone possibly lend me the DVD?

Neil Gaiman posted a link to a story about small-town homophobes wanting to remove gay-themed books from the local library, which would be just a normal, dismal story of people who urgently need killing (the Christian Civil Liberties Union has to be the most nonsensically-named organisation since Campaign Against P0rn0graphy And Censorship) if it weren't for the name of the town: West Bend. Everyone reading those books is already a West Bender, so what's the problem?

*This option is unavailable on match days, though - that path is closed, just another of the thousand disruptions to everyone else's life which must be made for the sake of the thrice-damned footballists.
**And porcupines! And rhinos, which terrify me. And tamarins!