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

It only hit me on Saturday, passing a washed-out version of it on the side of a Tufnell Park building, that the Nuclear Power - No Thanks! image is a smiling sun. The sun being, of course, a massive, unshielded nuclear reactor. Nice work there, idiots. In other nuclear news, sort of, I was intrigued by Francis Spufford's piece about a forgotten moment in the Cold War when the West felt it was being overtaken by a forward-looking USSR. I loved the science-fictional details. For instance - in 1961 the Party under Kruschev made attaining what we would now call the Singularity a manifesto commitment. By 1980. Which was obviously quietly forgotten after he was edged out of power but still, it was a statement of intent.
Note also, as Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman has, that in the fifties Soviet economic growth massively overshadowed ours, just as Chinese and Indian growth do today, and leading to much the same Decline of the West rhetoric from the more self-lacerating Western commentators. Let us hope the modern version looks just as foolish in 50 years' time, at least as regards China.

I recall Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel being widely dismissed as another underwhelming British comedy film, but I thought I'd give it a go anyway, and you know what? It's really good. The only feature film of the late Gareth Carrivick, who also directed the similarly underrated TV series The Smoking Room and the iconic TMwRnJ plus a load of old rubbish but de mortui nil nisi bonum &c, it puts three slackers (two of them SF fans, the other one not and so a handy recipient of expository dialogue) in that great British location, the pub - and then locates a time leak in the loo. Pleasingly ornate and generally very funny time-travel shenanigans ensue. It looked especially good seen soon after one of old Who's more timey-wimey stories,Mawdryn Undead. Which may feature the return of the Brigadier and the debut of Turlough, but is nonetheless a bit bobbins. The first episode especially has incidental music to make one utter the hitherto inconceivable words 'Come back Murray Gold, all is forgiven' - it's like a maniac with a keytar is following the cast around. Nyssa has a dreadful new outfit and make-up such that she no longer even serves as eye-candy, she and Tegan are required to be quite unaccountably stupid in furtherance of the plot, and the villain-of-sorts is dressed like some sort of half-arsed harlequin except that his brain is falling out. It's all rather unseemly. As for the conclusion...I can take a certain amount of coincidence, but when you get the hero out of the concluding deathtrap just by a happenstance of timing, that's too much.

Went to see Artery over the weekend. If you've not heard of Artery, they were contemporaries of Pulp in the early Sheffield days, and on songs like 'Into the Garden', they have some of that same mystery and menace which Pulp passed through for a moment on their way to the pop years and beyond. Artery now...not so much. With time, their frontman has picked up the waterproof and the hectoring masculinity seemingly unique to a particular sort of Northern man. Jamie was reminded of a third-rate John Lydon, but to me it was what would happen if the Gallaghers ever got political. Most disappointing. Far more entertaining was Mr Manners' turn on the decks, where freed of any responsibility to the dancefloor he out-Love Your Enemies'd LYE, going from recent Luke Haines into 'The Rhythm Divine', mixing Kajagoogoo's 'Too Shy' into Wyngarde's 'Rape'.

It occurred to me while we were all loitering around waiting for Luxembourg* - the smoking ban's body blow to nightlife isn't the smell of venues and people; that's a mere annoyance. The real problem is that it decentres places. For a good night out you have to believe, at least for a moment, that right here, right now is the best place you could possibly be. It's why I've never got on with clubs that have more than one active room - I always wonder whether the other room's better. And if the cool kids are always darting outside for a fag...well, then everywhere has another room, and nowhere seems sufficient unto itself anymore.

It's not a song I listen to all that often, but at the Sinister indie disco I heard Pulp's 'Babies' and wondered: with its incestuousness and its wardrobe, is it some sort of precursor to R Kelly's Trapped in the Closet? Also, a splendid moment with missfrancesca in her fake fur glaring at the tweeness, like some sort of Phonogram ghost of another timeline of indie.

Finally got round to attending the comedy at the Crouch End King's Head - Hell, I've still never been to the Red Rose after all these years in Finsbury Park. Headliner was the shouty bald bloke from Mock The Week, and he was pretty good, as were the two middle acts, even if one of them disturbed me by having one arm which was about twice the size of the other. But the first guy on, I don't think he'd been doing it long, and his delivery sucked. Still, one joke cut through that. Having explained that, yes, he's an American Indian - "and you think Britain has a problem with immigration!"

After initial reluctance, I've really got into the new (The Real) Tuesday Weld album, The London Book Of The Dead. It has less Will Self in it than I, Lucifer had Glen Duncan - the title refers more to a general sense of defeat. It has something of the same worn out grandeur as LCD Soundsystem's 'New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down' - fittingly, for they each assess great cities of the world in a time when they seem to be losing something indefinable but incredibly precious. The song titles say it all: 'I Loved London'; 'The Decline and Fall of the Clerkenwell Kid'; 'Last Words'. Elsewhere, they're slyly chipping away at romantic standards - 'Kix' inverts Cole Porter's 'I Get A Kick Out Of You', and 'It's A Wonderful Li(f)e' makes an obvious joke but does it bloody well.

I realise The Schema's video is no longer so much something which needs plugging as a phenomenon upon which one should offer comment; for the benefit of any non-LJ readers, Trappist monks and Martians it's song by rhodri, video by alexdecampi, guest appearances by too many to tag. I wasn't in it myself because I didn't want to become too ubiquitous as Floppy-Haired Man In Video, because past experience suggested that Self + Alex + Pop Video = Rain, and above all because it would have involved getting up far too early on the Saturday after a Friday on which I'd been up late having Sunday dinner and as such was already temporally thrown.

*Who were ace, obviously. Good mix of material, too - after spending a while concentrating on the new stuff, to make sure we got to know it because we couldn't just wait for the familiar favourites, the classics are being phased back in. Always best to be at ease with the past but not in thrall to it.