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

Just when the prequel webisodes and the first half of the series opener had me worried that the new series of Primeval was a bit straightforward compared to the inspired lunacy of last series, that skating so close to cancellation had them scared - they had the character played by Hannah from S Club distract a totally enormous and temporarily non-extinct dinosaur by playing 'Don't Stop Moving' really loudly at it. Excellent. But it still feels very odd that the only exciting original programming on TV all week is two hours on ITV1.

So, New Year's Eve. I've not been to anything but a house party since the Islington Bar glory days of Stay Beautiful, or to anything which required public transport for nearly as long, and I think maybe I had the right idea. I like Bevan 17, I like the No Fiction resident DJs, I even liked the odd singer-songwriter/accordionist/beatboxer opening act who seemed even more out of place than I was as they did a surprisingly good cover of 'So Long, Marianne'. But the crappy 8 bit duo in between who spent 15 minutes fiddling about as though it was going to make them sound any less piss-poor, and the Whip's DJ set of headache electro, and the boozed-up populace of Kilburn who just wanted somewhere to get lairy, and the hordes of mad-eyed partyers on the Tube of whom half seem only to go out on this one night...no thanks. I'm still not sure if I was actually ill or just in some form of existential shock, but having only had two pints while out, by 2am I was in bed, and on New Year's Day I felt considerably worse than if I'd been overdoing it round a friend's house the night before as per usual. But I do like the way the unusual shape of the weeks this time round has stretched out the holiday season - it has less of a direct effect on me than on a lot of people, but the sense of a proper extended break, almost of carnival, is contagious.

Mark Gatiss' history of horror reminded me that years back, m'learned colleague dr_shatterhand had recommended I watch seventies Brit horror The Blood on Satan's Claw. Gatiss brackets it alongside Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man as 'folk horror', and I'd agree with the first half of that; as far as I'm concerned The Wicker Man isn't horror at all, but an Ealing comedy by another name. This, though...this is definitely horror. Sometime in the early 18th century*, somewhere in the English countryside, a demonic relic is unearthed and the village children's games turn sinister. Very gradually, at first, yet it's still terribly sinister, and I love that - it reminds me of Arthur Machen's 'The White People', or the final Quatermass, or Robert Holdstock's Lavondyss from before his Mythago books got dull, when they still captured all the strangeness and terror of myth. What could have been a Merrie Englande fiasco is instead just grotty enough and grey enough to feel like the real countryside on its off days, as the diabolic forces bubble up from beneath.
(Added points of interest for Doctor Who fans: sh1t eighties Master Anthony Ainley plays the vicar, and sixties companion Zoe aka Wendy Padbury is the centrepiece of a ritual gang rape scene which, alarmingly, was apparently pretty much improvised on the spot)

*The blurb says the 17th, but a Jacobite character toasts James III, so no.

So it's precisely 105 years since the day on which it's set, and I've just finished Ulysses. Which in places is precisely as obscene and as incomprehensible and as up its own (and other) arses as the haters ever claimed - a particularly trying section for me being 'Sirens', which felt like trying to read a ringtone. But which is also so rich and so full and so alive. Whenever people bug me to write a novel, I tell them that I've only ever had two ideas for one, and I got beaten to them both. One was about a city in a state of existential collapse, citizens caught in the fall-out from a war they couldn't even comprehend - and just as I was starting to work out how that might play, three other people produced it (two of them called Jeff, which left me suspicious of Jeffs for a while). All very good, though, so if anything it just saved me some trouble. The other didn't even have a plot, so much as a style - the idea of a story which was perfectly in every moment, protean, shifting its form to follow the defining mood of each incident. Well, it turns out James Joyce beat me to it 55 years before I was even born, even if he left out the full-on action adventure chapter I think might have made it even more complete. I suppose in expressing the infinite richness of a single day, Ulysses might have inspired my favourite album ever, The Divine Comedy's Promenade, and that was always going to incline me in its favour. But still I thank heavens that I read it for pleasure rather than studying it. With something like this, or Gravity's Rainbow, I have to get into the flow of the prose, let it wash over me, appreciate it like music rather than trying to make sure I have the full measure of each individual word. If I'd run into it during my degree, I'd have managed maybe two chapters of notes, quit and bluffed, like I did with Henry James (to whom I've never returned). And I was going to say now that this was the last book I felt any obligation to read, that now I'm truly free...except I just caught sight of that copy of Don Quixote on the shelf. Not just yet, though, eh?
(I forget - has League of Extraordinary Gentlemen referenced Ulysses yet? If not, the obvious point of contact would be M'Intosh. We never do find out who he is, so I think maybe Quartermain)

Of course, because I had to finish this on Bloomsday, and didn't really want to get underway on any other big reads in the meantime, I was rather kicking around for shorter stuff to read these last few days, having got to the end of the penultimate chapter on Friday. So I very nearly finished Saturday's paper on Saturday, and have been getting through a lot of short stories, and yesterday I went to the park to read about two outsiders who rose to lead great empires - Benjamin Disraeli and Conan. Somehow I don't think those points in common would have seen them become great friends, though. Anyway, there was some canine event in the park, but I didn't notice any more dogs than usual - just bigger dogs. At least three which were bigger than most people I know, each of a different breed and each with a different owner. Also, I noticed grave goods. I'm used to floral tributes and pictures when someone has died young, but on a tree in the park it was instead a birthday of the deceased being marked, and as well as photos, notes and flowers, the friends had left vodka and Red Bull.

Primeval cancelled; should have known ITV wouldn't want to spoil their record by continuing to produce a decent show. You can't leave Danny Quinn stuck at the dawn of man, you sods!

I've only mentioned Primeval once this series, early on, when I worried that the changes to the format meant it was losing its charm. But over the past few weeks it's become increasingly clear that I should post again to say - I was wrong. I have no idea how long they can keep this up, but the past few episodes have shown a delightful determination to leave no stone of bonkersness unturned. They've not totally ditched the format - each week is still likely to feature a dinosaur or similar turning up through a hole in time or 'anomaly', rampaging around outer London eating stuff, and then being foiled by Our Heroes. But oh, such flexibility they've found in that format. The team has been shaken up - not least by having one of the main characters unexpectedly killed, in a mid-series episode where you're initially certain that there will be a way out of that - and there isn't. Jason Flemyng is not a great actor by any means, but he has the right sort of puppyish enthusiasm for a role where you get to eg bait dinosaurs with helicopters.
Two weeks ago, the plot formulated a situation whereby it made sense for Our Heroes to be running around some woods, unarmed, being chased by prehistoric killer ostriches against whom the only defence was dodging through a minefield. Last week, we got a double anomaly: a dinosaur turns up in the Middle Ages, and then the dinosaur and the knight who has of course taken it for a dragon end up in a modern wrecker's yard, which the knight not unreasonably decides is Hell. And that was all before the first ad break, it got stranger after that. Tomorrow, it looks like we're headed off to the post-apocalyptic future to which anomalies open up whenever they need a creature so outlandish that even the vast bestiaries of the past cannot supply it. And while I've never used ITV's iPlayer equivalent, it seems to have four episodes of Primeval available at a time. Give one a try.

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.

I used to respect Tom Hodgkinson; once the Idler was the best magazine going, and How To Be Idle remains (for the most part) a valuable work of political philosophy mis-filed as humour. Alas, of late he has become one of the tinfoil hat brigade, retailing tired cliches about mobile 'phones as enslavers and the like. And he really doesn't like Facebook. Shockingly, a major company has shareholders who are a bit right-wing! Not homophobes or religious nuts like run half the public transport in Britain, mind - but a utopian who's all in favour of life-extension and the Singularity. Which is a bad thing, apparently. No, don't ask me how. Oh, and apparently it's really, like Big Brother, man! that Facebook's privacy policy says "You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of user content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other users have copied or stored your user content." Because obviously if Facebook kept a record of anyone who'd ctrlC'd any of your content, and deleted that when you deleted the original, that would be in no way Big Brother-esque, would it?
Tosser.

ITV are really going for the big push, aren't they? OK, so their best show, Entourage, shows no sign of returning from its baffling mid-season hiatus, but that's an import. Their best home-grown, and the best thing they have on terrestrial, is Primeval, which restarted on Saturday. Kingdom is probably the weakest Stephen Fry offering in some time, but it's still Stephen Fry and thus better than almost anything on ITV; that came back Sunday. Royal dramedy The Palace looks like it might be half-decent, but it's scheduled opposite City of Vice (Henry Fielding fights crime - WITH WIGS!), so I shall probably never know. Oh, and there was Moving Wallpaper, wasn't there? That should have been good. I loved the idea of making a new soap, and then having a sitcom set behind the scenes of the soap, even before I knew Ben Miller was starring in it. They've also got a couple of Absolute Power alumni, and therein lies their problem - media in-jokes only appeal to a niche audience, and Absolute Power does them much better, even in the episodes written by Smug Slug*. The show has been infected with that terrible ITVitis (the disease which atrophies human acting and scripting ability even in the gifted). On top of which, they've absolutely blown it by showing Moving Wallpaper right before the soap whose production it shows/undermines, on the same channel. Echo Beach belongs on ITV1, channel of choice for the undiscriminating cudlip. The sly dig at it should not be interfering with their evening of cathode ray grazing - it should be tucked away on ITV2. Same slot, so people who want the pair reflecting on each other can still have the experience - but you should have to work for it, if only in the sense of changing channel.
Not that ITV are the only people launching inept sitcoms, of course. Consider Never Better on C4, with Guy from Green Wing once again playing a less amusing variation on the same character. But for heavens' sake don't consider it for very long, life is short and there is so much better stuff you could be watching. Or indeed, appearing in; his Green Wing brother Martin has been openly retconned into Primeval, which somehow evades ITVitis and continues to kick arse. Motorbike chases with velociraptors in a shopping centre? 'Sound of Thunder' time travel messes used to mess with the lead's head *and* sex up the set-up? Hannah S Club with a gun? I'm sold.

Have been listening to A Cellarful of Motown volume 3 a fair bit lately. It's volume 3 of a label rarities compilation and it doesn't have a single dud on it; how many labels can say that, and how many volumes would it take Motown before they started scraping the barrel? Which is not to say I love them all equally - 'Uptight' aside I never really got Stevie Wonder, and Carolyn Crawford's 'Too Young Too Long' is a bit reminiscent of the song at the end of Brass Eye's Paedogeddon - but not one track sucks. I find myself especially drawn to 'Loving You (Is Hurting Me)' but that may just be because it's credited to the Fantastic Four, so I picture it soundtracking another of those painful Reed/Sue/Namor love triangle scenes.

An interesting if grouchy piece on Marvel and DC notes that both companies, as corporate entities, place a vanishingly small amount of their emphasis on the ongoing publication of comics (against which, part of me is thrilled to see DC describe itself as the home of "such popular characters as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and The Sandman". Gaiman's boy in with the Trinity already...). And the scorn directed at the concept of an Ant-Man film is definitely misplaced when you recall that Edgar Wright has been named in connection with the project. But this ties in with something I was thinking about before christmas, except I see it as cause for rejoicing if only the message could be filtered up the line. To wit:
It doesn't matter what happens in the comics.
Corporate superhero properties have, as a rule, been reined in by a fear of hurting the brand. The theory goes that if little Tommy sees the new Batman film, and he then picks up a Batman comic at the drugstore/newsagent, it should to some degree tally with what he saw on screen. So Batman has to be Bruce Wayne (this has already nixed one of Grant Morrison's rumoured plans for the forthcoming Final Crisis).
Except drugstores and newsagents don't carry comics anymore, or if they do it's one of the reprint titles with 'classic' material. So it doesn't matter what's happening in the comics in the comic shops. Because if little Tommy goes in there, the retailer would be a mug to sell him the latest issue of the monthly. Give him one of the trades of the classics. If he says 'goddamn' a lot, give him All-Star Batman. If he's blatantly a goth, Arkham Asylum. I'm hard-pressed to think exactly what sort of little Tommy you'd need to think that giving him the monthly would be a remotely wise idea. So in the monthly, just let Grant Morrison do whatever the Hell the little voices are telling him, and everyone's happy!

Live Free Or Die Hard (fvck the UK title) is basically the same plot as Die Hard With A Vengeance + The Interweb, isn't it? Not that I'm complaining. And Die Harder is a great film overall, but definitely has the least compelling villain.

*He tries to pass for human by the name 'Mark Lawson', but does it really fool anyone?

As it nears the end of its first series, Skins is moving increasingly from its pleasing teen fluff beginning to a land of dark neon and twisted mindgames; obviously, I'm loving it. Also, having met Tony's mentalist sister Effie, I'm now totally over Cassie.
Primeval went out on a different sort of high with its first time-travel story proper (as with most Doctor Who, previous episodes had used time travel to put the story's components in place, rather than actually telling stories about time travel). But as brilliant as it was to see Claudia Sound of Thundered, or realise who the camp was, for me the finest moment was Cutter shooting the super-evolved bat-thing from the future. What made the scene was that he didn't say "we're not dead yet", because he didn't need to; it was all in the eyes, a territorial triumphalism far older than language.

We had been warned in advance that the local Tesco would be spending this week closed for refurbishment (presumably it's just not sexy enough for Stroud Green Road anymore), but it seems a bit harsh that on its last day open it was almost entirely bereft of so many staples - the shelves normally devoted to bread, milk and fruit wouldn't have been out of place under communism. How are we meant to provision for the closure like that?

I remain deeply disappointed in myself over my performance at Quasar (although at least our team still won) but I managed to wash some of the salt out of the wound at the thoroughly enjoyable Guided Missile night. I liked the Duloks' shouty girl pop and Silvery's moments of sounding like Sparks, but bloody Hell they have short songs; in comparison, the Low Edges were practically prog, and I think they managed 13 songs in their brief set. Excellent as ever, obviously.

There's something at once reassuring and terrifying in learning that even Susan Sontag, towards the end, "spoke with leaden sadness of time wasted" - because it's a reminder that none of us, no matter how thoroughly we try to live life to the full, can ever escape the shadow of that great affront, mortality.
Likewise, knowing that even Susan Sontag felt "It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short" is at once a sanction for, and a corrective to, the sensation that with so many things one wants to read, it's a bit of a waste of everyone's time to write - because what if she'd let that stop her?
Then again, all this was learned in a piece by her son introducing one of her last essays, in which we were reminded that even Susan Sontag could be grotesquely wrong at times. Her generalised attacks on television might apply to daytime pap, but if she lets that stand for the whole then she's forgetting Sturgeon's Law - 90% of everything is rubbish. She should have watched more HBO, and seen TV in a flourish of creativity comparable to Renaissance London theatre, happening right now.