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

Feels like life has been fairly quiet of late, (except when it hasn't, of course - Hyde Park picnics, Leyton pubs that are at least decently apologetic about hating my people, SE14's answer to the Shaftesbury). But in early summer, especially this year as it's still picking up from the tardy spring, I don't mind that. The evenings are still simply beautiful, without that complex melancholy they acquire later on - though it would help if I had the park for them, when instead it's being turned into some sort of prison camp for Madchester arseholes (sorry, tautology, I know). Still, I've had my chances to go a-roaming - up trees, over banks, through hedges and across a Heath resplendent with buttercups like I've never seen. Even got to share a tree with a jay at one point - a much better companion than parakeets, who may be beautiful, but in prolonged proximity are no better than the sort of person who wears Beats By Dre headspeakers. Guessed a stranger's dog's name, too - though given my guess was Slobberchops, based on obvious physical features, I don't think that's much proof of psychic potential.

Been watching a lot of adventure series lately - The Avengers, Brisco County Jr, Adventure Time - and hardly any films. One exception: Night of the Eagle, which as the name suggests is close kin to the MR James adaptation Night of the Demon. Peter Wyngarde - excellent value as ever - plays a sixties Richard Dawkins who discovers his wife's a closet witch and makes her burn her "protections", after which their lives go about as smoothly as you'd expect. There are loose plot threads all over the place and it doesn't even seem quite sure whether magic works or not in its world, but it's thoroughly eerie nonetheless. Spartacus ended for good, and Doctor Who for now; the former was the downer it was always going to be, the latter much better than I'd dared expect, though it may have helped that I had the contrast of having just finished the rambling Reign of Terror, the first full Hartnell I've attempted in a decade or more.

And then after 'The Name of the Doctor' there was Eurovision, in which as ever the worthy victor was robbed - this time it was Romania (or rather Romoania) with the gay dubstep vampire. We left after that and Bonnie Tyler to see The French Electric live down the road, sounding like the National before they went boring, covering songs from Dare! and getting away with it. They were followed by a tragic act who could have sounded like Mazzy Star or Lana del Rey if only the drums had been turned down (or preferably off), which was my cue to depart. Thee Faction and Joanne Joanne at the Buffalo Bar were excellent, same as last time they played there together, and once again I drank entirely too much. Possibly because I'd realised that, if they're a genderswapped Duran Duran and Keith and I had been hanging with them in the pub earlier, that made us genderswapped 'Girls on Film' video babes. I should possibly be seeing them again tonight, but outside was calling, and I'm still in a certain amount of gig-shock after seeing the Art Brut birthday gig on what they weren't allowed to call the Glass Ceiling Tour. Ten years! They've learned a lot in that time, though. And the Scala...I'd forgotten how much I liked that venue. I'd forgotten how much I like the rare big gig - and it turns out they do still exist - where the crowd Get It. And the support slot from Keith et al wasn't bad either - I think the best show I've seen them do since the Devant support with the spiralling, near-infinite 'One Thing After Another'. They're a big band, a big stage suits them.

Anyway, my dears, I think I need another cup of decaf tea before Justified. It's a rock'n'roll life and no mistake.

David Niven starred in my favourite film ever, and though I don't remember much about his autobiography The Moon's a Balloon, I do retain a sensation - as with some marvellous party - that it was utterly wonderful. So over Christmas I've been dipping into Bring on the Empty Horses, his selection of brief memoirs and pen portraits of other Hollywood greats. And make no mistake, Niven is a terrible name-dropper - but he lived a life where the names were worth dropping. So we get him playing a round of golf with Clark Gable and Douglas Bader, or escorting a pissed F Scott Fitzgerald off the set (where a cricket game has been set up like baseball because William Wyler's a pillock), or being literally thrown to the sharks by Errol Flynn. He was there when Humphrey Bogart's kids met Noel Coward, he got roped in when Frank Sinatra wanted to take Kruschev's wife to Disneyland himself, and he had the misfortune to be sat next to Spencer Tracy at Jimmy Stewart's stag night. He's not the greatest prose stylist who ever lived, but he's OK, and with material like that, OK is all you really need. And with perfect timing, just as I was finishing it off my free Lovefilm trial sent me The Bishop's Wife, in which Niven - normally one of the most charming men who ever lived - has the twin handicaps of playing an overworked stuffed shirt of a bishop, and having Cary Grant - the most charming man who ever lived - playing opposite him as a rather unconventional angel. The whole thing comes across like a Wings of Desire for a simpler - if not altogether naive - age. And given it's all about Christmas miracles, it turned up just in time - if I'd watched it any later than yesterday the Yule Goblins might have got me.

In the evening, xandratheblue brought over a film which was somewhat different: Zombie Strippers!. But for all the deiberate, gleeful trashiness of the film, it's also surprisingly smart. Robert Englund, for instance, plays one Ian Essko, and his strip club has rhinoceros iconography. His partner is called Madame Blavatsky. Each of the strippers represents a different approach, drawn from the history of Western philosophy, to trying times. The zombie virus affects women less rapidly than men - so the patrons of the strip club get dehumanised much more drastically than the women, who in the short term seem empowered. Certainly it is not quite as clever as it thinks it is, but it's a lot cleverer than the middlebrow drivel which normally wins film or book prizes for addressing these issues. Also, it has more breasts and headshots.

Spartacus: Blood and Sand is another hybrid of carnage and smarts, in rather different proportions. Like all the best American TV of recent years, it's about America - and because of the way the past few decades went, that means it's about the world. A world where the poor are enlisted as allies, betrayed, and then when they protest, enslaved and sent out to die. The rich don't even enjoy their power because they're so busy jockeying for position amongst each other. But John Hannah and Lucy Lawless own this show, and they're playing the squeezed middle - trying to edge their way up the ladder even as they get sort-of-rich on the suffering of the real poor. Well, at least they can still afford (on credit, of course) a few little luxuries, like slaves to deal with the foreplay before they start screwing. Because while yes, there is some sand, like I said on Facebook a better title would have been Spartacus: Blood, Nudity and Swearing. The foul language is inventive in almost the same way as Deadwood or The Thick of It - albeit also occasionally ludicrous. Something one can say for the violence too, done in an OTT, stylised fashion with fountains of bright red blood that would be risible if 300 hadn't paved the way. You can tell this didn't cost as much as HBO's Rome, say, but it works, mostly. And this in spite of what could have been a major problem - to wit, none of the gladiators can act. Well, Spartacus himself just about manages it, but I think the rest are wrestlers or Gladiators in the modern sense or something. However, they all look suitably tough and get more than sufficiently bloody when they get in the arena (or scrap outside it), so they'll do. Oh, and also, Spartacus isn't actually called that, but so far he keeps getting stopped by something or other whenever he's about to tell us his real name. I bet the season finale reveal is that it's Trevor, or possibly Biggus Dickus. All of this is from Starz, the US cable network that's co-producing the next series of Torchwood. If they handle all of their output like this, it could be spectacular.
(Update: some details about that Torchwood just came through - and interestingly, they play into Lawrence Miles' theory about Jack-style immortality somehow becoming a cancer on reality. Which I'm sure is entirely coincidental, and I'm equally sure Miles won't see that way)

Yesterday I finished a peculiar little book which left me almost more interested in its publisher than itself. Capuchin Classics have borrowed the green Penguin are no longer using for their modern classics - or perhaps one a shade away from it. They otherwise have a more uniform look, though - and not a bad one, pencil drawings for the covers, all very tasteful. The indicia lists not a publisher or editor in chief, but a chatelaine. And their selection includes a few standard, public domain classics - and then a lot of books like this one of which I had never previously heard. Clearly a labour of love; I approve.
The book itself was The Green Child by Herbert Read, of whom I knew little except that he wasn't conventionally known as a novelist - apparently this was his only one. Apparently he was an anarchist poet and critic; of those three descriptors, only 'poet' would you deduce from The Green Child. There are parts where I was reminded of Graham Greene, who supplies the introduction - except that this is a Greeneland where everything works out for the best, in peace. Something about the quality of the light made me think of Firbank, except that there's none of his fussiness in the style or his loucheness to the content. As the title suggests, the story deals with the myth of green children, except updated to the nineteenth century. Or at least, half the story does, because while the protagonist is returning to the sleepy English village where he grew up, he spent much of his life - and more than half the pages - leading the South American republic of Roncador (yes, of course it got namechecked in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) - hence a Study in Scarlet situation where for most of the book we're away from the ostensible interest. Still, it does mean we get two rather unsettling but apparently sincere utopias in one short novel, and that's some going.

Not a week of great eventfulness, unless you count the strictly local excitement of a new Sainsbury's on the Maisionette Beautiful's block. The weekend saw another fine Nuisance and another Dons rehearsal (we shall be on the internet wireless tomorrow at 2pm), and an engagement party en route to which I again took the gamble of a 'shortcut' along the canal. If this has ever worked, it doesn't with the works currently underway, but it can produce other, more interesting results. Such as finding oneself on a floating walkway which leads, ultimately, to St Pancras Old Church and Coroner's Court - two key locations in the Bryant & May book I read recently, as spookily London as one could wish in the autumn twilight.

My free Blockbuster trial* is up now, and the last of the DVDs have been watched and returned. Odd blighters they were too: both Youth in Revolt and Observe and Report star stars of Superbad, but neither is funny. At least in the latter case it seems to be deliberate. The set-up - mall security guard with delusions of grandeur - could easily have been funny. Keep the exact same script and cast Will Ferrell, you'd have a comedy. But the way Seth Rogen plays the part, it's really quite upsetting. And intermittently brilliant, especially when it skewers the standard Hollywood rhetoric about sticking to your dreams &c.
Also seen: Joe Meek biopic Telstar, which is very good though I preferred the early, funnier hour; and Centurion, in which Dog Soldiers director Neil Marshall basically remakes his bonkers Doomsday, except this time it's the real Hadrian's Wall instead of a near future one, and shot in the real Scotland instead of South Africa. Whether it has the right idea about the fate of Rome's Ninth Legion I don't know, but it does have a damn fine cast (David Morrissey, Noel Clarke, Dominic West whom some readers might like to know spends much of his appearance topless and/or in chains), and some Iraq resonances which are fairly deftly handled, and an awful lot of gore. Albeit some of it historically inaccurate gore, because the Roman legionary's gladius was not a slashing sword.

*Not strictly free, in that it's a quid for a month. But because I'm signed up to Cashback Kings, I get £7.50 back, so in fact it works out better than free. I got a tenner from a Lovefilm trial via the same method, but that only lasted half as long. Swings and roundabouts.

I always tended to take from the weekend before Christmas up 'til the 2nd off anyway, so it's only since the day after Bankside Twelfth Night didn't bring a rude awakening that it really started to sink in; yes, I am now a gentleman of leisure. When I was lounging around before, watching Caligula and Bagpuss** - that I would have been doing anyway, redundancy or no. But yesterday, watching a spot of Carnivale, reading a book about giant monsters, and heading down to Sir John Soane's before meeting a friend for drinks at half four...that was liberty. And it helped that Sir John Soane's was even more eccentric and crepuscular than usual, with the heating on the blink and candles providing most of the light, such that when you catch sight of yourself in the mirrors, surrounded by the past, there's a real flash of Crooked House possibility that you might be back there, or they might be here. Anyone comes to me with their "consensus that work is good for people", they're going to get laughed out of town.

*Never having seen the full-length version before...blimey. It's not that I've never seen such things before, just not normally in films which also feature Sir John Gielgud and Dame Helen Mirren. Untrue, though, as is sometimes said, that the extra filth is plot-irrelevant stuff; that's just our culture's latent prudishness showing its ugly face again. There is some gratuitous material, it's true, but other bits make much more sense of Caligula's relationships with his betrothed, his sister and his wife.
**And never mind that juxtaposition - the vagaries of the alphabet have landed that dear saggy old cloth cat next to Baise-moi on the shelf.

Looks like tomorrow's the final Fosca show; a shame not only in itself, but because that's a second band this year with whom hospitalsoup won't be playing a London farewell show. Which said, I can definitely appreciate Dickon's reasons, and if anything the knowledge of an ending makes me look forward to it even more than I already was.

Which reminds me, the final episode of the show I'm at last prepared to call Jekyll was possibly the best of the lot (especially the really-quite-obvious-once-you-realise-it-take on what emotion Mr Hyde represents; I think it was only having Alan Moore's LoEG take on the character in the way that stopped me spotting it sooner). And The Shield, as ever, managed to find a whole new level of Hell to which it could descend. But the Take That Star Stories? I wasn't convinced. I think the mistake was in having Gary Barlow do the voiceover, as against a generic voiceover guy with a pro-Barlow agenda. I can't see how that change alone was enough to kill it for me; perhaps the ensemble had changed too, or they lost a writer? But as if a switch had been thrown, I just wasn't amused anymore.

If puritanism really had no part in the smoking ban, and it was purely a public health issue, I look forward to the imminent ban on the relevant printers in all workplaces.

There are plenty of depressing periods in world history, but the worst are the ones which manage to be incomprehensible as well as miserable. I've just been reading up on the Hellenistic Age; like the Carolingian era, it basically consists of a great emperor's heirs squabbling over his legacy like particularly vicious jackals - and all having the same bloody names while they're about it. So various Philips, Alexanders, Ptolemys and Antigonuses make alliances with one against the other, shift allegiance the first time they see an advantage in it, and generally make one despair for coherence as much as humanity. Things reach a low point - by any definition - when one particularly obese and unpleasant Ptolemy throws over his sister-wife (and brother's widow) Cleopatra for her daughter Cleopatra, this union producing three further Cleopatras, who soon get into the family spirit with a rare enthusiasm for sororicide. This is all a couple of generations before the Cleopatra (VII) with whom we chiefly associate the name, of course - and before we get there we encounter the charmer Mithridates, responsible for the Rwanda-style massacre of 80,000 Romans in Asia, and who managed by practice to render himself so immune to poison that he eventually found himself with difficulties committing suicide. Oh, and did I mention that all those famous slave revolts - you know, Spartacus and company - well, whatever you may have heard, they weren't actually against slavery per se. Hell no, however would society function without slaves? They just didn't feel that they personally ought to be slaves.
Frankly, the whole bloody mess makes Rome feel like an especially restful outing for the Mr Men.

This one goes out to anybody who ever lost an election to RON.

Because we don't have enough religious groups complaining about things being 'disrespectful', a bunch of pagans have decided to get in on the act, complaining about Trinny and Susannah giving the Long Man of Wilmington "temporary pigtails, breasts and hips". Look, you imbeciles, he is the Long Man of Wilmington. He may not be the Cerne Abbas giant, but he is close enough to the male principle to be entirely secure in his sexuality. Think of all the mythic heroes who do their time in drag! He will get over it, and I suggest you follow suit. And if we're talking "disrespectful", then you so-called 'druids' and the impostor who dares to take the name 'Arthur Pendragon' ought really to start looking a little closer to home, don't you think? Oh, I hate special interest groups. A twin pressure group complaining that Big Brother is being twinnist, apparently failing to spot that the twins were not made this way by Endemol. That retarded screed doing the LJ rounds about supposed racism in Doctor Who. The world is drowning in a swarm of tiny minds who can only process any stimulus through whether it fits their own cast-iron agenda as it affects their own tunnel-vision area of interest.

Rome's second series was losing me for a little while, but has regained my attention by the simple expedient of going totally bugfvck insane. Gratuitous lesbian org1es! Octavian suddenly replaced with another actor who looks not the slightest bit like the last one! Torture scenes all over the place! A sustained challenge to what had always been assumed to be Oz's lifetime hold on HBO's bumrape crown! And above all - Mark Anthony's spectacularly unflattering beard! I can increasingly see why they had to stop after this series - there would simply not have been anywhere loopier to go short of recasting Britney Spears as Cicero.

I never took to Gaslight on screen (I may have attempted the wrong version), but the Old Vic's stage version was another matter. It's much stronger for observing the unities...well, most of them; for a psychological thriller, once or twice it does come a little close to French farce, at least once accidentally. The Bond girl and Pompey both give excellent performances, but the surprise for me was Andrew Woodall; where Anton Walbrook was far too obviously sinister as the husband, he makes a believable Victorian paterfamilias, much more ambiguous as he infantilises his wife, much more plausible. And the real surprise for me was how much that theme's played up, how strong a feminist statement the play makes - because from the four novels I've read, most of Patrick Hamilton's women are absolute bitches.

After a whole season of Russell T Davies smugly grinning and SFX techs geeking, I abandoned Doctor Who Confidential, but I made an exception for the Stephen Moffat episode because Moffat always gives good interview. I had no idea, though, that we'd get him and Tennant interviewing each other around Television Centre and a generall great documentary out of it. But the most moving bit came, surprisingly, from RTD, when he talked about how, as a kid, he always thought that at any moment you could turn the corner and see the TARDIS there, door half-open.
Which reminded me of the TARDIS-a-like 'phone box in Derby Children's Hospital, and rushing towards that half-open door, and finding only a payphone inside. I wonder if that's where it all began to go wrong?

Didn't make it to Stokefest in the end - my sources informed me of crowding, and summer crowds are not my idea of fun. But the local history...that I liked. Rampaging elephants! Bob Hoskins! Mutant milkmaids! Finsbury Park has had it all. Maybe even Ho Chi Minh, though the evidence there was hazier. Plus, the definitive sources on all this include the work of Ken Gay. Now, you'd think a name like that was hard to beat, right? But you'd be reckoning without his collaborator, Dick Whetstone.

Never mind the stripper vicars - what about a flasher judge?