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

Saturday night: a double bill of bands whose videos I've been in, so I was expecting to get mobbed by Youtube enthusiasts but people just seemed to watch the bands instead. I suppose they are both ace, so fair enough. If further proof were needed, I heard Loyd Grossman tell Brontosaurus Chorus "that was really good" in his actual Loyd Grossman voice. Didn't stick around for his band, though. Watching Loyd Grossman's pub rock band is a bit like shagging the Queen - worth it for the pub anecdote if you've got nothing else on, but if there's another offer you'd enjoy, it's just perverse. Of course, that did also mean missing Mr Solo but hey, it's only a fortnight since I saw him. The Queen-shagging analogy doesn't extend to that bit, I don't think. But off to Don't Stop Moving for pop we went. Whenever I go to two things with music in one night, however varied the remits, there will always be at least one song played at both, and this time it was 'Uptown Top Ranking'. Not the Black Box Recorder version, alas. In between playing 'Identify What The Own-Brand Confectionery Is Imitating' (and usually very well, both as in I guessed them all and they were all indistinguishable in taste from their more famous prototypes) I danced rather a lot, including twice to Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance'. I think that, helped by the Camden Head's pleasingly overpowered soundsystem, I may be on the verge of being worn down/won over.

On Friday I wasn't going to go out because of the storm, but then it hit me - that's precisely the reason to go out, because hearing the great wind batter against the windows is fun but seeing the leaves lashed by air and water, the hurrying shadows from the Fullback's smoking pagoda is so much better. The best moment came when one gust caught a pub table umbrella, sending it pirouetting high into the air - and then plummeting clumsily down the central well, like the suicide of a ballerina attempting one final gesture against gravity. Except obviously I didn't say that at the time, going instead with 'oh my god' followed by 'sack the juggler'.

Thursday was the release party for the new issue of Phonogram, except it's not out yet because of some printing cock-up, but I did end up with an issue anyway. Don't bother trying to follow that. The point is, I think this is my favourite issue of The Singles Club. I said earlier on in the series, and azureskies notes from the other end here, that with this prismatic run of individual experiences of a night, it's not so much about the craft of the comic, because that runs at a consistently high standard; it's about which issues are your experiences, your people, your bands. And of all the music so far (yes, even 'Atomic') my favourite is the Long Blondes. This issue reminds me why, while also reminding me why I took them off my MP3 player - "My life is neither as good or bad as a Long Blondes song, but I have the sense and understanding that perhaps...well, perhaps one day it may be". More so even than the work of Greg Dulli, they are music to do bad things to. And yet after this issue, the first album is back on the MP3 player.
(Also out this week from Gillen and (partially) McKelvie, S.W.O.R.D. which Gillen correctly describes as His Girl Friday in space. Top fun, but I think I may enjoy it even more once the obligatory Dark Reign tie-in is out of the way because for all that it was a timely and smart direction for the Marvel Universe, I am starting to get a leetle tired of it)

The House Beautiful is having the Bathroom Slightly Grotty renovated, which while it's not before time, is mildly inconvenient in the meantime, especially what with me not needing to be at a job during the day or anything because of the whole 'epochal depression' business. Meaning that by the time I'd normally be surfacing in the morning, today I had already showered, dressed and watched Hard Candy. I remember this being much praised at the time - a hard-hitting but thoughtful and taut drama about paedophilia. Mainly, though, I just found myself thinking that now To Catch A Predator does the entrapment bit for real, TV doesn't exactly need this, and that as a two-hander which mostly takes place in one house, it would work much better as a play.
Also, I totally failed to register that the male lead was the guy who played Nite Owl.

Sentences which could easily be misinterpreted: "I was mourning the end of a long-term relationship with a massive bender."

Grant Morrison has abandoned The Authority, putting most of the blame on the predominantly poor reviews the first issue received. What? Where would he be, where would we be, if he'd quit Animal Man or Doom Patrol or JLA over the reviews which missed the point? Even with his current Batman run, a lot of people were underwhelmed until he deployed the issue that pulled it all together. On top of which, this is a man who more than anyone else understands art's roots in magic. That first, brilliant set-up issue of The Authority began with our world, our poor hero-less world...and then threw in The Authority to save us. You can't leave a spell like that half-cast, man! And for pity's sake, it was only meant to be a four issue run anyway. If he'd been on schedule in the first place, it would all have been written before those bad reviews even appeared.
I'm still looking forward to his DC Universe stuff, obviously. But this has really dented my respect for him.

It's little more than a month since I first saw The Long Blondes live; this time I knew the new album and they played 'You Could Have Both', but I still have my reservations, and they come down to one thing: Kate Jackson's not the 'Kate Jackson' of the songs. I say this not as any criticism of her, you understand - only with the same sense of regret as accompanied my realisation that Viggo Mortensen is not actually Aragorn. I love the Blondes' music for its loneliness, the predatory gleam in its eye, its desperation. My kind host cappuccino_kid tells me that in the smaller shows in earlier days, more of that sort of stuff came across. But at a triumphant Forum show, with the crowd singing back every line...well, Kate's too busy having fun to get caught up in all that angst, and who can blame her? It suits some of the songs (from 'Guilt' onwards, the show really comes alive) but I am forced to conclude that, like St Etienne among others, for me The Long Blondes are a band where the live incarnation just isn't quite what I'm after.

Hushang Golshiri's The Prince seems to be accounted quite the classic of Persian literature - Golshiri was imprisoned by the Shah and no more popular under the ayatollahs, which always augurs well. Nor have I any criticism of James Buchan's translation, or his introduction (which one critic correctly classifies as "lucid"). The problem is...there's only so far a translation can go. The back cover told me of an ageing prince looking back on his life and his dynasty's extinction, which made me think of Lampedusa's The Leopard; the tone sounded somehow akin to that obscurely poisonous quality in Mishima. These are both writers I've enjoyed in translation, and yes, there are resemblances to both. But the hallucinatory shifts in identity, the portraits unconfined by their frames...these reminded me more of Polanski's Repulsion or Cronenberg's Spider*. Imagine trying to write those out as prose. Now, imagine trying to translate that prose. Oh, and all the characters are obliquely identified historical and political figures about whom your translation's readers are unlikely to know much, if anything. Imagine a Mongolian reading The Damned United, or a member of a remote tribe whose first encounter with Western literature is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, and you will have some handle on my frustration.
The LoEG comparison's an interesting one, because straight after finishing The Prince I read an earlier, simpler Alan Moore - the recoloured 'Killing Joke'**. A book Moore has damn near disowned, purportedly because he doesn't feel it means anything in the wider world - it's just about Batman and the Joker being very similar, and since they don't exist, so what? Well, I'm not so sure about that. It's not his finest hour, for sure - like most of his DCU work bar Swamp Thing it's maybe a little sketchy, a little hurried. But would it mean anything to someone who'd never encountered these characters before? I think maybe it would. A murderous madman says all it needs is "one bad day", and any one of us could end up like him; another madman tries to prove him wrong. That's universal, isn't it? At least as much so, I would contend, as Golshiri's last scion of a deposed dynasty, at once ashamed and envious of his royal ancestors' excesses. Batman and the Joker don't exist - but nowadays, do faded princelings? Only a handful in the gossip columns; for the rest of us, strictly by analogy.

*Yes, I know it was a book first. But still...
**Yes, the new colouring job is much smarter, much more evocative, and simply better. But perhaps not so much so that the book's worth buying again if you already own it. Handily, I didn't, and this was free.