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

It may be the night when the boundaries between the worlds are at their weakest, but the main thing I expect from Hallowe'en is a chance to have a dance in my cloak. Which I got, plus the chance to stalk home through Stoke Newington and Brownswood Park afterwards. Although on this of all nights, I find it unbelievable that you can still get catcalls from oiks. It's Hallowe'en, you dreckwits! It's the one night of the year when you're meant to be dressed like this and are not being even mildly controversial by so doing! Also, you know how some people pronounce 'nuclear' as 'nucelar'? There's a reverse one about too, because I definitely heard a few 'Draclua's.
('Count Fvckula', on the other hand, is a perfectly acceptable alternative)
Anyway, Nightbeast - very rocking, but with a name like Nightbeast I fear they'll never find another gig which will live up to a Hallowe'en debut.
On Saturday I went to Feeling Gloomy's Leonard Cohen special. There should be more clubs playing Leonard Cohen.

Execrable hack Jeph Loeb has been sacked from Heroes, so I may give it another go once we get to the relevant episodes. Sadly, Marvel comics have not had the sense to do likewise. Maybe I should fake his voice, ring Sarah Palin and claim to have done her daughter?

In the run-up to the US election, I find myself very receptive to TV touching on the American Dream; I'm misting up at Simon Schama's The American Future: A History, and devouring HBO's John Adams. Which is a peculiar series, every episode seeming to exist in a different genre: the first sees a mild man radicalised, like a Mel Gibson film done right; the second, leading up to the Declaration of Independence, is the one brimming with patriotic pride; when Adams goes to Europe in the third, his hopelessly undiplomatic diplomacy in the structured courts of Europe turns the whole thing into a comedy of embarassment. And through it all comes a sort of higher patriotism - because I am, after all, not American. I'm British, hence one of the bad guys in this story (The American War of Independence - is it the only war it was ever right that Britain should lose? I'm struggling to think of another). But the ideal of America, like the ideal of Greece before it, is part of the shared heritage of humanity's better part - even if, being in the hands of humans, it has shown the human tendency to fall terribly short of the ideal.
It's weird, though - being a young country, America has a national epic where the facts and figures are a matter of record. The rest of us have myths we can recast and reinterpret, but theirs...well, the DVD finds the series accompanied by a feature called Facts Are Stubborn Things. They can play a little loose with some details - the editing of the Declaration of Independence feels like a scene from a student newspaper office, with Franklin distracted by Jefferson's other great creation, the revolving chair. But Franklin still talks mainly in Franklin quotations, and we have yet to see George Washington with an outfit or facial expression other than the one from that portrait.

In the same time period, I've finally finished the Talleyrand biography I've been reading on-and-off for ages. Was amused to read that after Waterloo, various well-meaning English liberals attempted to use writs of habeas corpus to prevent Napoleon's rendition to exile in St Helena. This, remember, is after he has already escaped from one, gentle exile on Elba, left Europe in tatters, caused the death of thousands and even left France in a considerably worse position than it was after his first defeat. And yet, still, some people are primarily worried about the possible infringement of his human rights.
I do love Britain's liberal tradition, but it hasn't half bred some soft idiots in its time.
(Talleyrand himself is a strange figure - a man who prized stability and good governance above all things, but had the misfortune to be born French. Had he lived in Britain, and been able to curb his taste for backhanders, he'd have done very well in the Civil Service**, and his name would now be forgotten. But living in France...he never managed to direct events half so much as he would like or even as much as this adoring biographer contends. Consider, this is a man who felt that among the things France most needed were a free press, the rule of law and lasting peace with England - and yet he ended up intimately involved with the Revolution, at the right hand of Napoleon, and in practice acted as precious little brake on either. And yet, for what little he did achieve, he has attained immortality - albeit by being remembered as a byword for duplicity, vanity and greed. Oh, and his legendary wit? Either it just doesn't translate, or it was rubbish in the first place and people only laughed like they do at any powerful man's jokes. Like Wilde in Stoppard's Invention of Love, he lives in history simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Suddenly, obscurity doesn't seem so bad. And if any of that seemed like patriotic chauvinism, I refer you to Talleyrand's own summary - "The English do everything better than we do". This in a letter to a countryman, mark you, not as part of his usual sycophancy)

*Cloaks are so great. I sometimes seriously suspect that as much as I want to set the world to rights, the primary appeal of superpowers is that they'd give me more excuses to wear a cloak.
**"They think I am immoral and Machiavellian, yet I am simply impassive and disdainful. I have never given perverse advice to a government or a prince, but I do not go down with them. After shipwrecks, you need pilots to rescue the shipwrecked. I stay calm and get them to port somewhere. No matter which port, as long as it offers shelter." - that could be Sir Humphrey in an unusually open moment, couldn't it?

You may have seen an article or 20 about how The Wire is the best TV show ever. Four episodes in to the first series, I can't honestly disagree. I perhaps wouldn't go as far as outright best (there's an unaccountable lack of Time Lords, for starters)...so let's say 'best drama set in what is generally believed to the real world', and leave it at that. It's funny, it's terrifying, it's a state of the nation piece, it doesn't have a single character who isn't instantly and compellingly believable, it's perfectly pitched and it never fails to hold the attention. It has also managed to put Baltimore straight to the top of my list of 'places never, ever to visit', but no matter. It took me a little while to acclimatise to the cast - there are an awful lot of alumni of fellow HBO masterpiece Oz, and one in particular is playing a narcotics cop again which sets my brain off on one of its little crossover trails. And, in what I imagine is a rarer overlap, it's less than a week since I saw Dominic West as a Czech student in Rock'n'Roll, and now here he is as an American cop. Though in some ways Jan and McNulty have an awful lot in common; they're both determined to do what they believe is right, and they both tend to piss people off in the process.
(In other happy HBO news, they've optioned A Song of Ice & Fire)

It pains me to say this, but some of you may be living your lives in darkness, unaware of the wonder that is Beta Ray Bill. In brief: Beta Ray Bill is Marvel's version of the Norse god Thor, reimagined as a skull-faced bionic alien space horse (a technique I would like to see applied to several other religious figures, incidentally. What could possibly go wrong?). Stormbreaker: The Saga Of Beta Ray Bill is written by someone I know better as an artist - Michael Avon Oeming - but he turns out to be one of those happy few who can jump the counter and not make a mess of things. Writing huge cosmic stories is not easy - if you're basically using exploding planets as punctuation then all too soon it becomes about as exciting as using commas (see Infinite Crisis or much of its lead-in, for examples). But here, when those planets explode (well, the inhabited ones, anyway), you feel it as EXPLODING PLANETS OMG. It helps that Oeming is unafraid to go as unutterably OTT as this sort of story needs ("Soon all the universes, multiverses and megaverses will be mine!"), but is also capable of reining it in for more 'human' moments without collapsing into distracting mundanity or schmaltz. Cosmic comics are much like Superman comics; they're almost always awful, but when they work, they're one of the high points of the medium. This cosmic comic works.
And now I really, really want a Beta Ray Bill icon.

The new Idlewild single, 'No Emotion', is rather fine. Which comes as a pleasant surprise given what a dreary, dull experience their last album was. Turns out they haven't reached the 'will this do?' phase of their career just yet, they were merely having an off year - now they're back to being spiky and yearning and generally Idlewildish, and it makes me happy.

And this deduction as to what the Hell DC and Marvel have been playing at recently may or may not be correct, but is certainly inspired.

Just returned from Rock'n'Roll, which as far as I'm concerned cements Tom Stoppard's place as *the* playwright of the last half-century. But before I say more than that, I need time to ponder it properly, for unlike too many of his supposed colleagues, he doesn't provide easy meat.

For reasons I can't wholly fathom, the new Doctor Who companion, Martha Jones, will be appearing in a book before she's made her TV debut. But having read 'Made of Steel', at least it doesn't exactly spoiler anything significant. Indeed, being one of the 'Quick Reads' series for simpletons, it's entertaining enough for half an hour but ultimately doesn't do a great deal of anything at all. The plot and dialogue are passable, about on a level with the more generic episodes of new Who, and Martha comes across as Rose Mk II, another feisty young lady - but then, Terrance Dicks was never exactly a master of characterisation. At least it doesn't have any of the outright idiocies to which RTD's reign has been increasingly susceptible, but it seems I must yet wait for the new TV series to form any real opinion on Martha.
(Meanwhile, over on the radio the current Paul McGann series has finished with another Cyberman story - which, like much that had come before, seemed like a hybrid of the new TV series and what Big Finish had done before. It wasn't without its own flaws, but the basic concepts were strong, and again, at least none of the stories were plain stupid)

Because shortsighted privatisation just hasn't gone far enough: "The future of radio microphones - used at concerts, sporting events, festivals and theatre shows - is under threat from new proposals from Ofcom. The media regulator is considering auctioning off the spectrum they operate on to the highest bidder, as part of the digital switchover."
Elsewhere in the vast field of governmental idiocy, this picture encapsulates why I will never vote for Ken Livingstone again, and indeed now hope to see him begging and broken in the gutters of the city he presumed to drag along on his slide into naive political grandstanding. And as for another of his cursed legacies, apparently Olympic transport plans rely on the "working assumption" that, on top of normal holiday departures, an additional 8% of Londoners would leave "to get away from the Games". The same Games which we're told are a great draw, are also now meant to drive an exodus? Plus, "MPs were particularly concerned that contingency plans for things like power failure, security alerts and signalling problems on the railways were not well developed." Because obviously these issues very rarely cause problems on London transport, right?

I don't play computer games very often anymore, so bear in mind my frame of reference isn't huge, but Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is bloody brilliant. A selection of heroes from the obvious to the obscure, with unlockable alternate outfits, all manner of fun powers, and a totally ridiculous plot existing solely so you can charge around the Marvel Universe hitting things. Want to send half the Fantastic Four, Deadpool and Elektra to beat up a bunch of rioting Atlanteans? You can. Want to lead Thor and Moon Knight on a religiously insensitive and needlessly violent rampage through a Shaolin temple? It's here. Want to ponder briefly why rubbish commie Iron Man knock-off Crimson Dynamo is meant to be in Asgard, before concentrating on the more important business of kicking his face off? Of course you do!
The most surprising thing for me (aside from getting stuck in corners and walking into slashing blades on account of above-mentioned lack of practice) was that I seemed to spend most of my time choosing to play characters I've never read in a comic, specifically Deadpool and Moon Knight. Though in Deadpool's case, the machinegun was definitely a factor.