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

Sylvester McCoy!
Giles Coren. Ale Meat Cider.
Syllables all gone.

In advance, I hadn't been sure whether or not I was going on the Slutwalk. There just felt like too many potential pitfalls in the set-up. Too many cogent objections had been raised - in particular the artist formerly known as Belle de Jour seemed like someone worth taking seriously on the topic (though in the event I think her concerns were misplaced - I saw a couple of big contingents of sex workers, not getting any apparent gyp). And yes, the bloody Socialist Workers were out as usual, trying to hijack proceedings - but beautifully, many people were grabbing their NO MEANS NO placards and then stripping off the SWP identifiers. Which sums up why I'm glad I went - for the most part, people just seemed to Get It. It was OK to be dressed up, or undressed, or just dressed normally. Everyone was being really good-natured. It reminded me of the first time I went on a Reclaim the Streets in the mid-nineties, and they weren't being all Two Minute Hate about the protest, they were going Situationist-inspired and taking the approach 'What if you gave a party and everyone came?' Hence music and playfulness soundtracking proceedings as often as slogans. I've missed that. Even as I spent the noughties becoming increasingly convinced that most of the world's problems would be solved by a few (thousand) bullets in the right heads, it was good to be reminded of the nineties when we had the less glamorous, more systemic problems which came with the End of History, problems which seemed better transcended than directly opposed. That was all thoroughly incoherent, wasn't it? What I'm trying to say, in contravention of the obligatory Father Ted banner, is Up With This Sort Of Thing.
(Up too with Zoo Lates, probably the most classless event I've attended in London, with everyone from the Sloanes to the Essex stereotypes happily mingling and cooing at penguins. There were even a couple of furries out in public - I rather hoped the lion would get loose so they could experience the full spectrum of life as a zebra)

As regular readers will know, I love the films of Powell & Pressburger, and consider A Matter of Life and Death to be the single best film ever made by anyone, ever. But I haven't even watched all the films of theirs I own on DVD (because then there'd be none left to see!), and I only just got round to Powell's controversial solo outing Peeping Tom. And what a strange creature it is. It looks like a P&P film, in the depth of colour and the sheer Englishness, but you can tell from the off that something is very, very wrong. And that uncanny quality, the sense of a nasty stranger in a much-loved friend's clothes, must have been a factor in the damning critical reception it got. But if it hadn't been received with a level of anger and incomprehension that ended Powell's career, you almost suspect he'd have been disappointed. And where could he have gone? You'd only have something like Henry VIII, sat there awkwardly at the end of the Complete Works when Shakespeare has already said his grand farewell in The Tempest. But not said it so fondly, for this is a poison pen letter to cinema, a mea culpa, a prescient warning that "all this filming isn't good for you". Michael - that shy young man from the sample on St Etienne's So Tough, who always seemed so nice - is one of the most psychologically consistent psychos I've ever seen in a film, resisting that collapse into generic Evil Loony which they mostly make. It's very, very good, but I don't know that I ever want to watch it again.
(Addendum: I'd taped it from TV in 2005, and beforehand there was a fragment of Film 2005 in which Jonathan Ross was talking about promising child actor Dakota Fanning. Dakota Fanning whom I last saw having all the sex and drugs in The Runaways. What a difference six years make)

This one's going to get geeky, so let's start by establishing that yes, I do sometimes engage in more socially well-adjusted activities. Well, if you can count going to the V&A (they have so much pretty stuff, but what is it *for* when lots of that stuff would be equally at home in the British Museum?), or attending a Britpop night in a Geneva t-shirt, or hanging out with fugitivemotel and at one stage uttering the phrase "Oz Season 7, starring Wizbit". And OK, at the party I attended on Saturday I did have a conversation about the Sisters of Mercy's much-better-than-other-bands-called-Sisters cover of 'Comfortably Numb'. So yes, it would seem I am in fact a hopeless case. Oh well.

It was September when I last posted a general State of the Comics Union moan. Since when, not much has changed. I've dropped an increasing number of series which, even if I vaguely want to read, I know I'll never want to reread. More are coming - when Astonishing X-Men and Ultimate Avengers reach the end of the current stories, they're out, because they're not bad little superhero romps but nor are they worth more than a quick read courtesy of the library and, if I've mis-guessed what the library will get in, I'll live. Buffy was in line for the same treatment after the sheer galling idiocy both of the identity of the season's Big Bad, and of the manner in which said identity was revealed (online via fake leak, not in the comic itself) - but Joss Whedon wrote the most recent issue himself and reminded me that it was seldom the big stories which made Buffy so much as the little moments, and this was they. Of course, the next arc is by Brad Meltzer and is going to have a Mature Readers warning, between which and his previous work we can doubtless expect some gratuitously rapey mess which gets me right back to quitsville.
But there's just so much coasting going on - and miserable coasting at that. Both DC and Marvel claim that a bright new direction is coming once the grim'n'gritty carnage of current events is done, but I've heard it all before (and I'm barely been reading anything from DC in ages, they're in such a joyless tangle). At Marvel what seemed like a brilliant idea for a while (businessman Norman Osborn aka the Green Goblin talked himself out of responsibility for his crimes and ended up effectively running the country, as the very rich always seem to manage - ring any bells, bankers?) has just been plodding on and on and remorselessly on. And now it has finally reached its endgame - Osborn and his forces attacking Asgard, home of Thor and his fellow gods, which J Michael Straczynski's run on Thor had relocated to Oklahoma. But the comic telling this story, Siege, feels from its first issue more like it's going through the motions of amending the status quo than like the epic story it should be. Brian Bendis, the writer, has previously had problems with the pacing in the middle acts of his big event comics, and this one was shorter so should have been better, but it's as if he's cut not the padded kidriff, but the kick-ass opening.
There's still good stuff, of course; of the titles I praised in September, Ultimate Spider-Man and The Boys are still delivering. The Walking Dead gets better and better, and I don't even much like zombie stories. Vertigo, previously responsible for Sandman, Preacher and The Invisibles among others, has become relevant again with Mike Carey's The Unwritten and Peter Milligan's Greek Street, two very different examinations of the unexpected legacy legends and fictions can have in the modern world. But, will either of them last? The economics of comics are so horribly marginal, it can never be guaranteed; both writers have a string of prematurely-cancelled titles behind them. Word of another casualty has just come in; Phonogram's Kieron Gillen has been doing some lovely work on a space-based screwball comedy X-Men spin-off called S.W.O.R.D., but weak sales mean it ends with the fifth issue. Meanwhile, he's trying his best on Thor but the aforementioned Straczysnki run left him with having to pick up from such a moronic start point (Latveria Is So Bracing!)* that he's really swimming against the current.
Another writer I usually think of as reliably great, Grant Morrison, is in more position to be master of his fate and work, but isn't really putting it to best use. His Batman & Robin hasn't maintained its strong start, getting bogged down in themes he's already done better elsewhere; I feel a real lack of anticipation for the imminent Joe the Barbarian; and as for his Authority...well, OK, it's not really his anymore. It's Keith Giffen scripting Morrison's plots, because Grant stormed off in a huff. And Giffen's a competent enough writer, usually, but it turns out that he can't write British. So Morrison's most thoroughly, heartbreakingly British lead since Greg Feely in The Filth now talks about leaving things in his other 'pants', and his first 'apartment'. The issue of The Boys set amidst the baguette-jousting inhabitants of the village of Franglais had a better ear for dialect than this.

And as if that little diatribe weren't bad enough, today the main thing lifting me out of the sense of 'meh' which comes with this horrible sinus-y cold is the storming victory my new-look Tyranid army managed in last night's game of Warhammer 40,000.

*I love Babylon 5 - mostly - but JMS' comics career has been one frustration after another. Either he loses the plot, or he falls out with the publisher and storms off, or in extreme cases, both. People told me his Thor was excellent but having been burned before, I waited. And I finally read the first two collections recently and lo and behold, this was one of the cases of 'both'. There's a lot to love: instead of talking in cod-Shakespearean English as previous writers so clumsily attempted, his Asgardians speak formally but coherently; it's the themes which echo Shakespeare now, with the prince uneasy on his father's throne, the adviser who whispers poison in a good but naive ear. And the abiding question: what do gods do when their legend is over? If they survived Ragnarok, what now? Yes, in a sense it would have been a better theme back in those days when we were told we'd seen the End of History, but it's still a fascinating one.
However. There are scenes in post-Katrina New Orleans and war-torn Africa which demonstrate that Straczynski hasn't learned a damn thing since his legendarily bad Amazing Spider-Man issue where Doctor Doom stood in the wreckage of the World Trade Centre and wept. And, though I've yet to read the third volume which fully explains how he got to where he left the series, I've seen enough to know that yes, what looked like a stupid idea which Gillen was obliged to pick up, was also a stupid idea approached from the other end.

It always used to be - perhaps still is if you catch me off guard - that asked when I'd like to live, I'd instantly reply 'the twenties'. Yes, as a rich person, obviously - just like anyone who thinks we've never had it so good is obviously thinking of themselves rather than a Third World peasant, just like nobody ever said Rome and meant as a slave (well, except maybe a few serious submissives). But a while back a doubt dawned and has been niggling ever since - were the twenties rich any different to the arses clogging the gossip mags I spurn? Do we just romanticise them through distance, the same way classic pirates seem sexy while having your yacht seized by Somalis with automatic weaponry is distinctly less so? DJ Taylor's excellent Bright Young People - The Rise and Fall of a Generation: 1918-1940 is doing nothing to convince me otherwise. Yes, in America the gilded twenties produced some artists of genuine stature - the Fitzgeralds, Dorothy Parker - but over here we mostly ended up with never-was-es like Stephen Tennant and Brian Howard, always just about to write masterpieces which somehow never quite materialised. Of the books written from and about the scene which did appear, most are now only ever read as research for social histories like this one, and even those which survive for wider public attention - which basically means Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies - are still principally known for reflexive reasons just as they were at the time; like their subjects, we read them to be at once scandalised and fascinated by the thinly-veiled documentary of the times*. Times which only produced these books. Which we only read because...and so on. If Waugh had kept his powder dry on the topic until Brideshead years later (assuming he'd somehow supported himself in the meantime and not become another Tennant or Howard), would literature be much the poorer?
But mostly, what was written about them was the gossip mags, the disgust/obsession of the middle-market rags, the same we see nowadays. "The reader's curiosity, in fact, was almost bovine. It went only so far. It wanted, above all, to be reassured that the grass it ate was grass, that the people presented for inspection, whoever they might be, were worth reading about." Consider the junkie Brenda Dean Paul, the radio news following her escapades with the same urgent irrelevance as Amy Winehouse or Pete Doherty gets from the websites and tabloids. And never mind Winehouse, she couldn't even claim such nugatory cultural achievements as Doherty, being an 'actress' in the loosest possible sense (but then, she did exist in a time before ITV drama, so that at least could have changed).
Understand: it's not Taylor taking this line - he laments the decline of the Bright Young scene into a parade of wannabes and ever-increasing efforts at novelty, but the wondering if there was ever anything there in the first place is just me. Similarly, the modern parallels are if anything underplayed. Though the book being a couple of years old, there's one at least which couldn't possibly have spooked him like it did me. Describing a Punch satire of the scene:
"Losing sight of Lady Gaga for half an hour, the interloper eventually finds her with her arm round the waist of 'a young heavyweight in horn-rims dressed as a baby', listening to a hollow-eyed girl ina tutu and an opera hat who is singing a song with the refrain 'It's terribly thrilling to be wicked'."
Of course, counterpoint all this with the worries of parents about how the Bright Young People were wasting their time, refusing to acknowledge the serious side of life and you realise - if they had, they'd still have been wasting their time. What else could they have done? Gone into business and been wiped out by the Crash. Gone into finance, and caused it. Gone into politics and achieved about as much at the rather duller masquerades of the League of Nations as the Bright Young People did at theirs which at least had plenty of cocktails - or stayed in domestic politics and as like as not been damned forever for going along with appeasement. As a wise man once said: "Yes, you may be wasting your life. But it's your life to waste. Hell, no matter what you chose to do, you were wasting it anyway. And that you have the chance to doom yourself in such a way...well, that's glorious." Or as an even wiser man put it, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". The good times are good times because of what they become as a half-memory which itself becomes an aspiration. Sometimes it's better not to meet your heroes, not even in a group biography.

*On the other hand, while I rather like the look of The Noughties Were Sh1t ("This blog will chart the worst of the noughties. The rubbish new genres, the horrible new trends, the idiot popstars, the dullard celebrities, the pitiful movements and the squandered promise of a rubbish generation. Think of it as a process of truth and reconciliation. We must make sure that the fucking noughties are never allowed to happen again"), I'm conflicted in the awareness that even aside from having myself had a pretty good decade - I may be a victim of the economic bust having never really got the benefits of the boom, and yet compared to a decade ago I live in a much better place with more friends and more avenues of entertainment - that site is the work of one of the best bands of the decade. A band whose driving force is disgust with that decade. And so the contradiction spirals on.

As of Thursday evening, I'm heading off to Ireland for a long weekend. I will likely be away from the Internet as well as London; if all goes according to plan, I should be returning to both late on Sunday, and then out on Monday to see Los Campesinos! live for the first time - anyone else planning on attending that? Meanwhile, am mainly emptying bottles of eg bubbles in order to transport <100ml of shampoo, facewash &c. I really would take a slightly increased risk of being blown to smithereens over all this faff.

As with The Sarah Jane Adventures, it was only through iPlayer's 'you may also like' smarts that I learned of the existence of The Scarifyers, in which Nicholas Courtney (basically playing the Brigadier) and Terry Molloy (basically playing a cuddly, ineffectual Davros) ally with Aleister Crowley against the horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos. It's neither as funny nor as thrilling as I think was intended, but still, it does have the Brig! And through its outro I also learned that Paul McGann's Doctor will be back on Radio 7 in a six-part adventure from this Sunday. The title, and whether it's already been released as by Big Finish, were not divulged, but I know from the excerpts that I've not heard it.
And speaking of the Cthulhu Mythos - you might thing that investigating the 'ghost peaks' of Antarctica is about as Mountains of Madness as it comes, but just to make sure, read down the article. Read down to the bit where one of the scientists explains how these mountains should not be, how "it's rather like being an archaeologist and opening up a tomb in a pyramid and finding an astronaut sitting inside. It shouldn't be there." Then lose 1d6 SAN.

Far too often I hear from the semi-literate that a given deck-monkey has "literally blown the roof off the club" or a particular slice of vinyl "literally set the club on fire". Saturday's Seven Inches/Penny Broadhurst/New Royal Family Show did end with the club at least smouldering; even if causality cannot be proven, that leaves them well ahead of the pack.

I didn't think it was possible, but I find myself feeling as if I've had enough Stephen Fry for the moment. Perhaps it's just that his tour around the USA launched over the same weekend as Simon Schama's American Future: a History; I get very picky when multiple things seem to cover the same ground (consider how much less forgiving I am of Heroes now it's not only overlapping comics territory, but screening in the same weeks as No Heroics). This is the sort of stuff Schama does best - big ideas, neither yoked too much to specific camera-friendly events nor floating off into the swamp of spurious Adam Curtis generalisations. It's what first drew him to me back with Landscape and Memory. The only problem is that as he tells us how the US has always had a tension between an optimistic belief in perpetual abundance, and the cautious counsel of realists, he is operating on a BBC far too awed these days by the false idol of 'balance'. So he can select clips which hint that Obama is a wise man and McCain another dangerous snake-oil salesman, but he can't say as much, only make vague references to the importance of this election. It's still worth watching, but I hope that once the good guys win in November (please gods), it can be repeated in an extended, re-armed version.

Kenneth Branagh would appear to be confirmed to direct the Thor film if he's cancelling other engagements. If anyone can handle it so as to make Thor sound Shakespearean, as against the ghastly Renaissance Fair approximation with which the ever-incompetent Stan Lee burdened him, then it's probably Ken. Still, after Stardust I think the loss of Matthew Vaughan remains unfortunate.

Am just returned from my stint as a member of Bill Drummond's The17. Given the whole point of the exercise is to stand apart from recorded music, it would seem unfair to record it here, but to all of you - and especially those who already expressed an interest but whom I couldn't handle herding - I strongly recommed you get in touch and get involved.

Luxembourg did their usual thing of playing their best when the odds were against them, but their set aside, Friday night was not great. So I very much needed the steampunk extravaganza* of Saturday's White Mischief. Such costumes! Moustaches Dali would envy, the goggles of gentlemen engineers, brass-bound jetpacks, silverware become radar dishes, armoured waistcoats. The fairer sex seemed mainly to go for variations on the theme of corsetry, which was as historically justified as it was welcome. Oh, and there was one cove dressed as a giant panda, who provided a handy locational reference if one was trying to find anyone in the British Sea Power crowd. And this was quite the best I've seen BSP, surfing the edge of chaos, dropkicking owls and scaling the balcony, and somehow projecting such concentrated sonic power that the next day, I felt like I must have spent at least some of the evening getting kicked in the midsection. Kunta Kinte also clicked for me, far more so than at the previous White Mischief (and on the whole, the Scala was definitely a much happier venue for the night than Conway Hall**). But to speak only of the headliners would be to misrepresent the wonder of the night - because it was a night, an event, not just a concert with trappings and frills. One could wander happily past dancers and skin-harpists and time-travelling pirates, or stop and stare. It felt, as too few nights feel, like the sort of club one sees in films, the party at the mad nobleman's palace.

There were a lot of poppies about last week; more than the last couple of years, I'm sure. Perhaps it was that ad campaign that did it (although personally I found the poppy ghosts bloody terrifying), but society at large seems to have remembereed that acknowledging a debt of honour to the dead and wounded is not the same thing as expressing an opinion on any particular war. I've even seen them worn unselfconsciously at gigs and clubs, which for the few years previous had seemed very much a Statement. And today, promptly, they're all gone - not dragging on shabbily and gauchely as they sometimes do. Perhaps it helped that the 11th fell on the Sunday this year?
(Odd though it may seem, I think the best piece I've seen on Remembrance Sunday this year was a retrospective on Amiga classic Cannon Fodder. Oh, and while we're on remembrance - I've never read more than the odd article or quote of Norman Mailer, and was always rather put off by his Dave Sim-approved comments on women writers. But this wonderfully honest and non-hagiographic appreciation by Christopher Hitchens makes me reconsider my failure to investigate further, cliche though it is to get into the work of the newly dead)

My contribution to Blog A Penguin Classic, a review of their edition of Henry V, is now online at their site; my initial grand plans were undermined when I spotted the character limit, but that may have been for the best.

Who drinks so much they don't realise they need to pee? And if they do, how come they don't just wet themselves? That always seems to work for the street drinker community. Granted, I am aware of one previous case of someone bursting their bladder rather than letting it out, but that was one of my less illustrious ancestors, who couldn't bear the idea of going for a wee on a train. So yes, OK, the unyielding will of the overly decorous leading to a burst bladder, fair enough. But the debaucheries of Binge Drink Britain (TM)? I find that improbable.

*What music does a steampunk night play? Well, I dressed myself up to the second Dresden Dolls album, and two of the DJs aired tracks from it, so that would be the short answer.
**Which has given me the seeds of a theory on the incompatibility of humanism and burlesque.

Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll, then; first things first - as with Hot Fuzz, if you don't like the previous work from the same source, this isn't going to change your mind. But as with Hot Fuzz, if you don't like the previous work from the same source then you are wrong in the head. Yes, Stoppard has always been a playwright of ideas - but those who suppose that this must exclude emotion from his work clearly possess neither. True, many plays of ideas have cardboard stereotypes spouting leaden exposition at each other, but the problem there is not that they are plays of ideas - it's that they're written by incompetents. And normally ideologically-motivated incompetents keen to prove a point, whereas one of Stoppard's greatest gifts is negative capability second only to Shakespeare's. The play opens in Cambridge, 1968, with Max the English Communist don supporting the USSR's 'fraternal assistance' for Czechoslovakia, while his Czech student Jan prepares to head home to defend the Prague Spring from the invading tanks. How easy to make Max into an idiot, or an outright evil man! And how pointless, and how artless. Instead Max has dignity, conviction and some great lines - as does Jan, and as does almost everyone else in the play (the Czech communist apparatchiks are perhaps one-dimensional, but not even Shakespeare could give every herald and attendant lord a personality). And from here we weave slowly through to 1990, after the Wall has fallen - each shift in time accompanied by the eponymous rock'n'roll. The music's view of liberation is contrasted with communism's, dialectical materialism against poetry's idea of consciousness, the true outlaw rock of Czechoslovakia's Plastic People of the Universe against the bands they imitated but who, living in the West, could never be rebels quite so truly. We see how shifts in Czech policy dishearten the radical and radicalise the disinterested, how Western Communists respond, how time and rock take their own tolls too. There's a strand about the Great God Pan, and that terrible voice proclaiming he was dead, and Syd Barrett, which I've still yet to fully grasp - I think it's talking about the end of eras, and the gap between mortal rockers and their divine aspect, and the pagan heart of rock'n'roll, but at least some of that I think I brought with me, rather than finding in the play. Then again, Stoppard's been shaping my own obsessions since I first read Arcadia, so who can tell anymore? He does what he's always done so well - he doesn't resolve any conflicts, but he brings them into clearer focus, and shows the hidden strands which link them to each other and to the poor weak humans doomed to enact them. He shows us how the hopeless, unconsummated love affairs of nations for ideologies aren't so very different to those between two people, and how sometimes it's as simple as everyone wanting what they haven't got (as if that were ever simple). And I should probably stop there, because I once wrote a dissertation on the man without even scratching the surface, and even that (if I do say so myself) was better than most of the available literature on him, which more often than not is just plain wrong.
(Though it's worth noting that while I didn't get the initial Hollywood cast, with Rufus Sewell and Brian Cox, I was there for the playwright not the actors, and in any case was possibly more excited by getting Dominic West and Nicola Bryant aka Peri from Doctor Who)

I think that'll pretty much do me for today, but via one character complaining of modern Britain that "This place has lost its nerve", I shall leave you with the 'request' that "State schools should avoid sex education classes and swimming lessons during Ramadan to cater for the needs of Muslim pupils, says the Muslim Council of Britain" (a more appropriately outraged version of which can be found here - not that I have much respect for the Express, but where the MCB is concerned their penchant for hysterical exaggeration is neither necessary nor noticeable). Both have a spokesman for the Department of Education responding that the Department will read the report in question "with interest" - as opposed to, say, "with hooting derision and a large gin", as should be the case.