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

Although these days he's more frequently seen in his guise of mediocre political journalist, John Harris doesn't want us forgetting that he started out as a mediocre music journalist. Apparently he edited "the now-defunct Select, a title that floated on the tide of Britpop and sank when it receded". Which is interesting, because I remember Select as being at its best just before Britpop, dealing with the bands who wouldn't quite fit into the grand narrative to come. And what does this rewriting of the past remind us of? That's right - Harris is a retromancer. Bemoaning how obsessed we all are with the past, he then goes on to rehearse the familiar old stories about how Lester Bangs and Nick Kent are the best music journalists ever (for the record - Kent was OK, but Bangs hated Roxy Music and as such, is never going to have anything to tell me. Or consider the Bangs quote Harris uses, of the mawkishness around John Lennon's death, Bangs wondering what "'the real - cynical, sneeringly sarcastic, witheringly witty and iconoclastic - John Lennon" would make of it all. If that's the real Lennon, who was responsible for 'Imagine' and 'All You Need Is Love'? Tosser). Obviously print dates are such that the article couldn't respond to the death of Steven Wells (for me, the saddest of last week's demises, even ahead of Sky Saxon). But consider all the other omissions. An article about the state of music writing which fails even once to mention Paul Morley is de facto worthless right there. But nor does it find space to mention any of the contributors to Melody Maker's nineties golden age. It bigs up a Mott the Hoople autobiography as "the best book written by a British rock musician" - well, I've not read it but if it's as good as Marianne Faithfull's first memoir, I'll be amazed. And recent years saw classics by Alex James and Luke Haines. Do they get a mention? They do not. The frequently-insufferable Pitchfork is cited as a good example of modern music writing; the consistently brilliant Popjustice is as absent as its predecessor, Smash Hits. I'm a fan of music journalism, and I don't recognise the field Harris is talking about.

Friday: Poptimism is less Jacko-heavy than expected, which is good given I only ever liked a handful of his songs. I inadvertently get far drunker than intended. Saturday: friends are drinking in my 'downstairs garden', and it would be rude not to join them en route to getting the paper, right? We end up cackling incoherently about eggs and realise that yes, we are no longer above this, we are drinking in the daytime in Wetherspoon's and we belong there. Although there is a break for Finnish bowling (actually just throwing a stick at some other sticks) and apocalyptic tempest, I proceed to get far too drunk, again. Sunday: Tubewalk day. I plan not to drink, but forget the sheer soul-shredding horror of the Edgware Road, End up drinking, on and off, for something like ten hours.
Today I really am not drinking.
(It's weird, though, almost as soon as you're off the road itself, the area is lovely, all odd little bookshops interspersed with I Saw You Coming-type establishments. Whereas on the road, you get girls proving if ever proof were needed that Rihanna's look only works on Rihanna. Also: the pub in Paddington station? It worries me. They have lightbulbs which are melting the picture frames beneath them, not to mention the clientele)

In other news:
http://www.explosionsandboobs.com

What a strange, tiring week it's been. All the stranger for having the shower broken again and thus being obliged to take baths - something I don't think I've done with any regularity for a decade, or at all in about five years. I used to swim loads, but now the mere feeling of being immersed in water seems alien again. Or seemed, for the first couple of times. What adaptable creatures we are - hence our domination of the planet, and hence the crap we'll put up with. Hence the fact that people live near Elverson Road, which is where our last Tubewalk ended, in a proper Local Pub For Local People called The Graduate, (in such an area, one friend suggested, you'd pick such a name in much the same spirit as you might call a pub The Phoenix or The Red Dragon), where the computerised jukebox helpfully informs you that its most-played track is 'Duelling Banjos'. An odd area, Deptford - the beautiful streets and the desolation mixed in with an even smaller grain than is London standard. A little too insistent in its naming, too - Friendly Place and
Friendly Gardens? The latter being perhaps the only time I've ever seen a 'no horses' rule so flagrantly flouted in a small park.
What else? A porthole-warming for curiousbadger, a birthday for hoshuteki and a reflex attempt to give the Noble an LJ tag because it is one of our best friends these days. And Self Non Self, suicideally and chris_damage's new night, where they play all those great songs which clubs tend mysteriously to overlook, like Shellac's 'Prayer To God' and Fad Gadget's 'Collapsing New People' and The Cure once they started making whole worlds with sound instead of pop songs, and all that stuff like the Mary Chain and MBV which I wouldn't really listen to at home but makes for the sort of background noise which tells you you're in the right place.

I was just reading a transcript of a radio show about London's decline, about all the inappropriate housing developments replacing old buildings, and gentrification killing the spirit of the cafes and pubs, and the overcrowding and the decline of the buses. It was a John Betjeman talk from 1939, before the war (though he knew it was coming) which gave London even more to worry about. And yet since then London has had what, four, five more great ages? Sometimes I worry too much about this city; I should remember she can take it.

I know full well that Scarlet's Well made four albums before they started recruiting people I know to the live experience, and Dickon's exit from performing duties was long enough ago for me to acclimatise, but no Kate or Martin? Really?
I still love Scarlet's Well, obviously, because few bands have ever chimed so perfectly with my own little obsessions, but Bid really does need to stop drawing attention to his own minor mistakes when performing. The audience hasn't noticed until you say something, man!

Hypothesis: the reason the very rich did more interestingly insane things in eg the eighteenth century than they do today is that cocaine had not yet been discovered, and so could not sponge up all the excess.

Yesterday I went on a Tubewalk which was actually a DLRwalk, where we found a beach! From which we skimmed some stones. I then proceeded to skim brick, glass, metal and wood. I rule at skimming. Some distance from the beach, or indeed any water, we found an inexplicable and inaccessible derelict lighthouse on some waste ground. Then we went to the farm where there were sheep and cows and the hill on which that Fad Gadget video with the skyscrapers behind the field was filmed. 10/10
Subsequently: pub, pizza, and eventually making it to Balham in spite of an arsehole under a train. Once in Balham, I played some truly lamentable pool.

'The Sontaran Stratagem': better than one might expect from Raynor's prior Who scripts, of which we do not speak. But given all of the components, it should still have been better than it was. And surely the Sontarans weren't always that short? I remember them as squat, but big with it. As for the cliffhanger - breaking car windows is fairly easy, Doctor.

While I think Popjustice may have gone slightly overboard as regards Rihanna's Good Girl Gone Bad, it really is a lot closer to being consistent and consistently very good than most R&B/pop albums. And when you've got something like 'Umbrella' which could so easily make even pretty good tracks seem like irrelevances by comparison, that's no small achievement.

I used to draw images of tanks and bombers all the time as a child, but I recall no international court taking that as evidence of war crimes in the Midlands. And mine had robots, sorcerors and Cthulhoid entities to boot.

When The Shield returned a month or so back, I was worried that it might suffer by comparison with The Wire after my recent binges on the latter. I needn't have; their moral universes are sufficiently different, the violent disorder and brutal corruption of LA is more than the width of North America away from the inertia and decay of Baltimore - even the hopelessness has a different flavour. But there remain, inevitably, points of connection. I have to avoid watching them too closely together simply because the gang slang of one tends to throw my ear for the gang slang of the other. And in last night's Shield ( spoiler, also for Wire s3 ) Absolutely staggering.

Relaxing at the moment, in the knowledge that I have a real flurry of activity coming - Paul St Paul & the Apostles at Stay Beautiful tonight, then two Tubewalks tomorrow running straight into the free New Royal Family/Low Edges/Luxembourg show at the Bloomsbury Bowl tomorrow.