alexsarll | Entries tagged with the melting ice caps

So. Last night I saw Hugh Grant and Newsnight's Michael Crick at close range. The former does a proper Clark Kent act when not in public, such that you initially think 'That guy would look like Hugh Grant if he didn't have those rubbish glassesOMGIT'SHUGHBLOODYGRANT!' In other words, Lois Lane is still a bit of a dolt for taking so long to catch on. Michael Crick, on the other hand, looks exactly like Michael Crick. And I saw them because I was at the Labour History Group, where floor-crossing MP Shaun Woodward, veteran journalist Peter Kellner, and a man named Neil who confusingly used to mind Neil Kinnock, were talking about the 1992 election, and why John Major surprised everyone by winning it. Turns out the whole idea about Kinnock's unelectability is an after-the-fact myth, certainly not matching with what was believed within the Tories at the time, or the polls then - even if some of the life-long Labour members still thought, with hindsight, that it was at least in part a fair assessment. Instead, it was specific tactical mis-steps which undid Labour, particular moments of luck which boosted the Conservatives. And the feelings towards John Smith were, to put it mildly, not as nostalgic as I'd expected. But apart from the Hugh Hefner-like image of Robin Cook in his dressing gown on a train (because I've suffered it, so now you must all suffer it too), the main thing with which I came away was the general consensus that both Kinnock and Major were fundamentally decent men, who had a good deal of respect for each other. How alien and long-ago does that sound now?
This talk was, of course, by way of a 20th anniversary post-mortem, but was nonetheless handy in its proximity to

perfectlyvague's rather good War of the Waleses, Which was officially summarised as "KDC's modern take on a Shakespearean history", though I would describe it more as a Shakespearean take on modern history. Not least in resisting the temptation to do recent politics as an impressions show* (sorry, Michael Sheen, but it has got tiresome). So 1992-7 is held up to the light and rotated, different facets seen - 'Honest John' Major becomes a tragic hero, Diana (not even blonde, but still perfect) recalls Oedipus at Colonus as she feels her mere humanity falling away, and the press magnate declaims and schemes with the earthy evil one expects of the classic malcontent. Not every character can be reinvented, of course - the horror of Blair is still too fresh for him to be played as anything but the loathsome shill he always was. If I go and see friends in plays, then it's because they're talented friends, yet still I don't expect to come away thinking more than 'that was promising, and scenes X and Y, or character Z, was very good'. But this, this was something properly special.

Otherwise: two front-room Edinburgh previews, Who is Nish Kumar? and Stu Goldsmith: Prick. Both good, but the latter more to my taste, not least because I was the audience target for the section on men's misconceptions about lesbians. The return of Black Plastic, now in a Dalston club which if it only had some dry ice would look like the nightspot from an eighties film, and which would seemingly rather you take in a 9/11 Truther sticker than chewing gum. The Melting Ice Caps back to the solo setting which suits David's songs best, and a new White Stripes-style live line-up for Philip Jeays. Plus shadow puppets from another act I suspect I wouldn't find terribly interesting without the shadow puppets.

*There was a Camilla Parker-Bowles lookalike, but she was only in the audience, so that's OK. Well, except maybe for her.

Current Mood: coughing
Current Music: Up On The Ride - Guillemots

Finally saw Four Lions and...well, in terms of British comedy hitting the big screen, at least it's not Magicians, but it's not Chris Morris at his best, is it? It's not even Chris Morris doing his best War on Terror work. I noticed at the time that none of the reviewers seemed aware of Smokehammer (now, alas, hosting only a tedious cut-up Dubya speech) or the excellent newspaper pull-out 'Six Months That Changed A Year'; some even said explicitly that Morris was 'finally' making his 'first' comment on the terror &c situation. Lazy hacks. So yeah, it's...alright. Obviously I laughed, but I didn't find myself transfixed like I did by The Day Today, Brass Eye, Jam or Nathan Barley. And as so often, I watched the deleted scenes and wondered why they'd been left out. One explains why Waj is even part of the team in the first place, which given his consistent idiocy in the final cut had been puzzling me; another exposes the brilliantly self-contradictory apologist logic by which the Twin Towers attack was supposedly an inside job, but Osama is still a revolutionary hero.

That was definitely a full moon weekend just gone, one of the nasty, tetchy ones where nothing quite works out. Not even the music; Lily Rae fled the stage after a couple of songs because of some sound problem only she could hear, Jonny Cola & the A Grades seem to have dropped their two best songs permanently, and The Melting Ice Caps' band incarnation looks like it's also here to stay. And not that they're a bad band by any means, but there are plenty of good bands, whereas what David was doing at the solo shows was unique. Mr Solo was in band format too, and even the Indelicates' great-as-ever set was slightly marred when, doing the handclaps from 'ATF' with another member of the backing choir from the recording, we were getting evils from other audience members. They don't know. They weren't there.

If anyone is desperate to see my thoughts on the Doctor and Jo Grant's guest appearances in The Sarah Jane Adventures, I already did most of it in the comments over on Diggerdydum. But in summary, isn't it brilliant/mental/a comment on the DVD era that a show for the under 10s can make a big deal out of using a character not seen since 1973, and get how she would have ended up so very right? Typically for Russell T Davies, half the fanservice made no sense whatsoever and nor did the plot, but he got some great emotional moments in there. And because that just wasn't quite enough Doctor for one week, I also watched Tom Baker in Warriors' Gate, one of only two Doctor Who stories I have ever given up on*. But that was many years ago, before I'd seen enough European films to cope with what is essentially Last Year at Marienbad, except starring furries, who in one of the time-zones have been enslaved by Dad's Army. All executed, because this was 1981, with much the same visual effects you'd find on a TotP performance of the same vintage. Obviously.

*The other is The Chase, the sixties story where it first became apparent how lazily and boringly overused the Daleks were going to be. That one doesn't get a second chance, at least not without company and alcohol.

Current Mood: disappointed
Current Music: Blow Your Horns - Sway

Since last posting, I have:
- Kicked arse at the Man who Fell Asleep's bookshop quiz, then wandered home drunk on victory (and possibly alcohol) singing along to the World/Inferno Friendship Society and not realising it was out loud until I registered the funny looks.
- Seen The Melting Ice Caps' new line-up and Mr Solo at the Library, which has stroboscopic loos that make you feel like you're being hypnotised by the KGB, and light-stands which are uncomfortably close to book burning. Fine shows by both, but while some gigs leave you in the mood for a RAMPAGE, others leave you a bit dreamy and more fitted for a slow wander home through the trees with the closing movement of Promenade on the headphones. So I didn't go on to Nuisance.
- Been to various birthday and engagement celebrations. At one, in the park, we celebrated the miracles that are mobile internet access and Wikipedia by seeing how much of the entry for Uranus is funny if you read it out loud (pretty much all of it, obviously).
- At another we made the sad discovery that you really can't go back; even if Ale Meat Cider has rum cask cider, it may not be the same rum cask cider. Sad times.
- Seen a fan club show by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, whose new logo looks a bit like a cock, but whose new songs include at least one which is fit to stand alongside 'Electricity' and 'Enola Gay', which is handy given they played those two as well.
- Got drenched en route to another birthday which was in fact a pub quiz. So it goes.
- Seen Let The Right One In, which is a charming Swedish film about childhood, being alone and finding someone who understands, and Crank 2: High Voltage, which is none of those things except 'film', and even then you could argue that it has more in common with pop video and computer games. Still, they both have a bit of the old ultraviolence, and that's the main thing, isn't it?

Current Mood: skint
Current Music: Hero - James

Went to see the new look Melting Ice Caps on Thursday. Interesting as it was to see a full band performance of David's new songs, talented though his bandmates all are, I hope this doesn't entirely replace the solo, backing track performances. Simply because there are already lots of bands, and there's nobody else doing quite the sort of live shows the Melting Ice Caps were.
(Beforehand, I did all the ironing. As in, all the ironing; for the first time in years, the washing and the weather and what I'd worn lately all converged such that every single thing I have which needs ironing, had been ironed. And then for a moment I thought, it seems a shame to wear a shirt tonight, considering. Except the whole point of having everything ironed is just so that it can be worn, isn't it? There's a moral in that, something about the self-defeating nature of perfection, but I can't quite put my finger on it)

On Friday, Nuisance's first birthday; the nineties night which just barely started in the noughties and has now made the whatever-the-Hells in style, for a given value of the word. And having the Phonogram boys along for the ride worked on So. Many. Levels. Retromancy ahoy. Also, cake. And Babylon Zoo, but let's not talk about that.

Sunday opened with a music swap; this was more successful for me than the equivalent clothes event, because a) there was more than one other male contributor to the pile and b) the contributor gender didn't matter anyway. Got myself a good haul, albeit one which made me look like I was trying a bit too hard to be eclectic given it ran from Manowar and Mastodon albums to a Trembling Blue Stars 7". And then I had to heft my goodies via a slightly more roundabout route than expected (because it turns out there are large stretches of the Regent's Canal you can't walk along, gits) to the regrettably terminal Stag's Head for Fall night. Which confirmed what I'd suspected for a while; my only problem with the Fall is Mark E Smith. Because all three of the bands here, not being fronted by bus station tramps, make Fall songs sound great - especially the Nuns doing the "check the guy's track record" one, whose name I was told at least three times and keep forgetting.

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: Crash Tactics - 65daysofstatic

Over the past week I have spent time among some strange tribes - the rats and bats and strange throat-clearing old folk of the Richmond riverside, the rollerbladers and riders of Hyde Park, even the little lost sliver of Central Europe that is Mayfair (it even has the slightly substandard police - though there's maybe a hint of India to it as well; I've never seen a library with so many Wodehouse books, not even my own). And this combined with an article from the previous weekend about the death/rebirth of travel writing and set me thinking, has anyone ever done a London travel book? By which I mean, one where writers from one part of London write pieces about other areas as the foreign lands they so clearly are. It seems like an Iain Sinclair kind of project, but I think I've read all his London prose and I don't recall anything quite like this. Arthur Machen's London Adventure has something of the spirit I mean, but as one would expect from a man of a more imperial age, his project was much more centred - he spoke of "the London known to Londoners" and the lands beyond, whereas I think more in terms of separate but equal principalities under London's aegis.

There was something about the light - and later, the quality of the darkness - on Saturday night. So walking to The Melting Ice Caps/Soft Close-Ups/Soft Ice Caps (no Melting Close-Ups this time) show at Gloomy (played to a rightly rapturous crowd, some of whom I don't even know personally), I didn't necessarily want any music in my ears. Except that I had the chorus of 'We Are Golden' by Mika stuck in my head and I sure as blazes needed something to shift that, because even as someone who rather liked (most of) his first album, I find the new stuff irksomely hollow.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Nu Style (Dee Kline & Ed Solo Mix) - Shystie

In spite of X2 being my favourite superhero film ever, I had an utter absence of plans to go see X-Men Origins: Wolverine - but when a friend invites you along for free, to a cinema that's a pleasant walk away on a nice evening...well, that's a different matter, isn't it? Plus, I was in a position to empathise, given I am currently in the midst of a procedure to bond metal to my skeleton (I have a temporary filling) performed by someone I don't entirely trust (a dentist) and which is likely to affect my memory (she also prescribed me some antibiotics on which I can't drink). And...it's OK. If you want a big dumb action film, or a film with naked Hugh Jackman scenes, I can wholeheartedly recommend it. ( spoilers )
On the way back, I realised that while I'd walked that route home dozens of times, I wasn't sure I'd ever done it sober. And on my MP3 player I was listening to two new loads, added before the antibiotics were prescribed, but which I realised were both by straight edge artists - The Streets' new stuff, and The Melting Ice Caps. Which, sat by the war memorial listening to 'A Good Night', helped reassure me that this week off liquor isn't a chore, it's a novelty. Because frankly, I am better than Duck Phillips.

I read Alfred Bester's Tiger, Tiger* years ago, and didn't really appreciate it; I suspect I may have been too young. Certainly it would have been before my Babylon 5 phase, so while I appreciated that it was the source of the name for Walter Koenig's sinister psychic, I didn't really grasp *why*. Now I'm finally reading The Demolished Man, in which one man attempts to get away with murder in a world where telepaths are a fact of life, and it makes perfect sense. The whole Babylon 5 treatment of psychics, from the oppressive Psi Corps in which they're all obliged to be members, to their interactions with each other and the rest of humanity - it all comes from here. In terms of predicting the future, well, this does so a lot less well than most of its fellows in the (excellent) Masterworks series. But as an evocation of paranoia, and of what telepathy might feel like both for the gifted and the blind, it's astonishing - and the increasingly outlandish stratagems by a killer and a detective who both know the truth, but can't yet act on it, remind me of nothing so much as Death Note. Less sexually charged, though, in spite of one key scene being set at an orgy.
I think I may have been driven to investigate by Michael Chabon mentioning that Howard Chaykin adapted The Demolished Man in his introduction to Chaykin's own American Flagg!. Which, again, I should really have investigated sooner. Deranged pulp futurology, it's the closest I've ever seen an American come to the early days 2000AD, except unlike 2000AD back then, the 'thrill power' here encompasses sex as well as violence, nihilism and insane technology. Something 2000AD has picked up on since, of course - even down to Nikolai Dante appropriating Reuben Flagg's 'Bojemoi!'

*So my father's edition called it, but the battle of the titles seems, in the intervening years, to have been comprehensively decided in favour of its alternative, The Stars My Destination.

Current Mood: even
Current Music: Idiot Child - Madness