alexsarll: (Default)
Most of the people I know in bands appear to be off in the Midlands this weekend. So what better time to be nice about them online, when I will feel less like I'm sucking up? Yes, I am totally brilliant at logic, why do you ask? In no particular order:
[livejournal.com profile] steve586's new project aka Ladies & Gentlemen aka Steven Dogs In The Wild, who get points just for knowing certain members of the audience might be 'pedantic about Greek myths' and are influenced principally by Scott Walker when he was good. They are able to overcome even the fact of making their debut in a shamelessly greenwashed venue whose eco-cred seems to consist of predictions about car use in 2010 still collaged to the walls, a chandelier made of 'recycled' (by which they mean full) biros, and flogging Strongbow for £3.50 a can.
Jonny Cola & the A-Grades, playing the much more pleasing (but equally new to me) Black Heart in Camden (which I would definitely recommend next time someone asks me for venue ideas). Somewhere along the way, they appear to have become a proper band. They are also part of a theme where bands have supports who, if not good, are at least on the same wavelength as them. Here it's Thee Orphans, some of whom used to be the glorious These Animal Men, but who now sound like Slade without the songs.
Similarly with the lovely, bruised-but-unbowed slow anthems of Rebekah Delgado at the Lexington. The late-night-whiskey sound of Madam makes for a perfectly matched support, and while the third act is not to my taste (one Regina Spektor is enough for me, thanks), if she is going to find an audience then it will likely be among fans of Delgado and Madam.
The bands playing at Flabby Dagger in Dalston are none of them my thing. In fact, they're all making a bloody racket. And yet, they make complementary rackets, and rackets which do somehow fit with the excellent fare the DJs are mostly playing, everything from 'Ring My Bell' to the Dead Kennedys.
And then, of course, you have the exception, the more common London gigging experience. Quimper are playing a night which is running a week late, thus clashing with the comeback show by the New Royal Family. Apparently this was because the promoter told the headliners the 31st. It's unclear whether this referred to the headliners who don't show up, or the ones who have a Keith TotP-style revolving line-up and lack of rehearsals, and as such could presumably have done the 24th just as well. Fortunately, in spite of the thrown-together situation, Quimper's electronic poems of malice win converts, so the experience wasn't a total fiasco.

Otherwise: I've visited the new look King's Cross, and wished that all temples to consumerism could at least be this pretty. There's a station bookshop called Watermark, part of an American/Australian chain who seem to be aiming higher than those grisly WH Smith outlets which stations normally use. There's the Parcel Yard, which we decided could be London's biggest pub, though its labyrinthine structure makes it difficult to be sure.
I've been on a psychogeographical odyssey (and not, as one friend on whom I cancelled had thought, a pub crawl) in Shooter's Hill, where the palace of the moon goddess rises amidst sunny suburban streets straight out of a Ladybird book, in that strange patchwork land where London flickers out at the edges.
I've danced to girl pop in Stokey, and remembered how much I've missed pop in clubs, and got excited to have a new night about which to get excited for the first time in ages.
Life's pretty good.
alexsarll: (bernard)
A few weeks back I wrote about a Ray Bradbury story I read which made me feel terribly sad that in the intervening years we haven't made more progress into space. Bradbury himself just restated much the same thoughts, which is nice - but then, by a freakish transformation which would not be out of place in his own books, turned into a silly old fool. "We have too many cellphones. We've got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now." Oh dear.

I've been listening a lot lately to the Spoiler Alert! EP, the work of masked musicians who quite coincidentally resemble Eddie Argos and Keith TOTP. Now, as a rule I don't like songs which simply restate the plot of a book or film, because it tends to feel clodhoppingly Literary and a bit sixth form (hence 'The Seventh Seal' being a major reason why I think Scott 4 is the worst Scott Walker solo album called Scott). But possibly because of the sheer lunacy of this project - trying to fit decades of convoluted, multiple-writer backstory into one pop song, Spoiler Alert! works. In particular, the song about Booster Gold brings out an aspect of the comic which I'd never really considered - the extra layer of secret identity implicit in a hero who has to carry on acting like a berk around other heroes, while covertly saving all of space and time behind the scenes. And, it's a lovely song. Whether it will have any appeal whatsoever to the distressingly large proportion of people with no idea who Booster Gold is, I could not say.

Otherwise: I've seen the artist formerly known as [livejournal.com profile] verlaine, back from the frozen North for a quick visit; I've been up Primrose Hill for the first time this year, which proceeded to do a fairly good impression of said frozen North; and I've finally seen the British Library's maps exhibition, which is gorgeous but has the problem of all themed or single-artist exhibitions - after three or four rooms of beautiful, enormous old maps, whatever wonders are in the next room can't help but feel, quite unjustly, like more of the same.
alexsarll: (death bears)
On Monday, as you may have seen in the papers, I went to Stationery Club (although obviously the paper is incorrect in its assertion that I was drinking beer. As ever, it's left to the bloggers to correct Old Media's mistakes). I'm not even that fussed about Post-its, really. But a live videochat with one of the inventors? That's a big deal. There was one point I'd have liked to raise, but I didn't really formulate it properly. Still haven't, in fact. But it goes something like this: there was a Spider-Man story years back, addressing the issue of why someone who could concoct that web fluid without proper lab facilities should be working hand-to-mouth as a photographer when he was clearly a brilliant chemist. So Peter Parker goes into a chemical company and they say, sorry, there's no market use for an incredibly strong adhesive which disappears without trace after an hour. Now, that's self-evidently nonsense, but even if it weren't, the example of Post-its - a use being sought out for a very poor adhesive, creating a product which, if unnecessary, is very lucrative - would disprove it. I suppose I was simply interested in whether Geoff Nicholson was aware of that. Instead, I just ended up with Post-its on my face, my pint and (in one weak visual pun) a heart on my sleeve.

Tuesday: the debut Proper London show by Bevan 17 or, as they're ludicrously claiming to be called in what is obviously a sop to [livejournal.com profile] steve586's rampant ego, If.... The fourth full stop there was to end the sentence, I'm not sure whether that's correct form in such cases or not. Normal practice on liking a band is to compare them to other bands one likes - and I suppose there is a little One More Grain in there, not that I have any reason to believe any of Bevan 17 have heard One More Grain, few enough people did. But mainly I am reminded of bands I don't quite like, fixed. I always thought the Fall might be quite good if they weren't fronted by a bus station tramp; here it's [livejournal.com profile] exliontamer instead, who is eminently presentable and well-spoken. Or Stereolab - I like 'French Disko', but otherwise found them just a bit too Gallic and inert. If they weren't, they might have ended up somewhere near here. They cover John Cooper Clarke with a Scott Walker intro, and get away with it. They come up with the second riff on PIL's "anger is an energy" that I've heard in one afternoon, and even though I really like Pagan Wanderer Lu, Bevan 17's is better.

And last night I played a frankly shambolic game of 40K, but the less said about that the better. So instead I should probably record how much I loved Michael Moorcock's Gloriana, or the Unfullfil'd Queen, a dialogue with Spenser that anticipates Camille Paglia's thoughts on Spenser as precursor to de Sade. I knew Moorcock and Angela Carter had something of a mutual appreciation society going, love across the genre barricades, but even given the pantomime matriarch Ma Cornelius, this is the first time I've read a Moorcock book which I can imagine Angela Carter writing - "the palace glares with a thousand colours in the sunlight, shimmers constantly in the moonlight, its walls appearing to undulate, its roofs to rise and fall like a glamorous tide, its towers and minarets lifting like the masts and hulks of sinking ships". Not that I don't love his outright fantasy and SF, but this would be a great introduction for those more sceptical of such things. So long as they don't mind a fair amount of rather abtruse filth along the way.
alexsarll: (crest)
I find Scott Walker talking about the thinking behind his recent albums considerably more rewarding than the albums themselves. But mainly I find myself thinking, why do I still not own Nite Flights?

There is much in this world that, while undoubtedly unpleasant, is not really worthy of note or comment. For instance, one can no more be surprised that reliably loathsome Mail Grand Inquisitor Paul Dacre is ranting about the BBC "destroying media plurality in Britain and in its place imposing a liberal, leftish, mono culture that is destroying free and open debate in Britain" [free registration required] than one can be shocked to find Satanic Verses ban enthusiast and general errand-boy of the Caliphate Keith Vaz MP proposing laws against cheap booze. When Dacre says of the Max Mosley trial that "most people would consider such activities to be perverted, depraved, the very abrogation of civilised behaviour of which the law is supposed to be the safeguard. Not Justice Eady. To him such behaviour was merely "unconventional"...But what is most worrying about Justice Eady's decisions is that he is ruling that - when it comes to morality - the law in Britain is now effectively neutral, which is why I accuse him, in his judgments, of being 'amoral'" - well, one hardly expects Dacre to have the wit to recognise the distinction between crime and sin, which even a loon like Kant could spot. He's the Kommandant of the Mail, of course such niceties are beyond him.
But here's the first noteworthy bit - why is this poison being hosted on the Guardian's website? Has their moral confusion really gone that far?
And even more so, consider this passage:
"The judge found for Max Mosley because he had not engaged in a "sick Nazi orgy" as the News of the World contested, though for the life of me that seems an almost surreally pedantic logic as some of the participants were dressed in military-style uniform."
Paul Dacre appears to be saying that, as near as makes no difference, all members of any military are Nazis. I've heard that line from witless anarcho-syndicalists, but from the editor of the Mail? In the week of Remembrance Day? If ever there were something which merited national outrage, a campaign of complaints by people who've not heard the whole story and shamed resignation, I think this would be it.
On the plus side - hey, at least the old 'Hurrah For The Blackshirts' Mail finally seems to have concluded that Nazis are a bad thing.

After watching Pineapple Express, Step Brothers and Tropic Thunder on Sunday afternoon, I was musing on how glad I was of the self-indulgent state of modern American comedy, where they're increasingly happy to sideline the sappy romance elements and just make, y'know, FUNNY FILMS. My mistake was then to attempt to watch Bad Lieutenant, which was every bit as silly while being convinced that I IS SERIOUS CINEMA. Did people really get excited about this? It wasn't even gruelling, just bad pantomime.

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