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

More than the usual weekend dose of Doctor Who; on Friday, after catching my first seven elephants (including James Bond elephant!) and a brief stop at Poptimism, I was one of the five Doctors at Are Friends Eclectic?. The eighth, obviously, because his TV career may not have been great but his outfit was the best. There may have been certain breaches of the First Law of Time and the Blinovitch Limitation Effect. AFE is great.
And then on Saturday, 'Vampires of Venice'. For some reason I hadn't got that excited in advance of this episode, in spite of having already seen the library card business. And there was plenty more to love, mainly in the interplay between the Doctor, Amy and Rory - the bouncing up and down with excitement, "let's not go there", hushing, combat deployment of Your Mum gags. But ultimately, it dragged a bit, resolution by Adam West-style climbing was anticlimactic, and how did it make any sense at all that a species change should be easier than a sex change? Not a disaster by any means, but a flawed mid-season entertainment. It's weird how even with Moffat in charge, Who is never consistently perfect. Perversely, I think it's somehow right that way.

Saturday: another Keith TOTP/Indelicates show. I've run out of things to say about these except that I swear 'I Hate Your Band' and 'Savages' get even better every time. Some Thee Faction-style intra-band ideological controversy when Simon said "our drummer's had to go to emergency homosexual rehabilitation camp"; this surprised me if only because Julia let him get away with "she said 'snatch'!" again. There was another band in between whose set seemed to last about 26 years, of which the first song was OK. They tried to flog us vinyl afterwards and I could quite legitimately reply "I don't buy records from people who diss Tesla". This on a night when I'd already discussed unicycles with the Vessel. I love my life. Would have hung around to give Black Daniel another chance, but my presence was required for dancing to pop at Don't Stop Moving. Mmmm, pop.

Strolled over to Hampstead yesterday for a combined birthday/engagement/welcome back to Britain drinks. Saw two puzzling things en route. One was a life-sized model camel which I somehow missed last time I went to ALE MEAT CIDER, even though it's just down the road. The other was a street sign where the legitimate N7 had been crossed out and graffiti added: 'N19! w@nkers'. I've heard about these youth gangs going by postcode affiliation, but they seem not really to have grasped how the system works. Terribly sad. Though as a Shield/Sons of Anarchy fan, I have to wonder whether these N19 loyalists call themselves One-Niners.

Am finding it difficult coherently to express the wonder of Saturday's Black Plastic, especially since I think it was done so well on the night by that tune with the chorus of "I am here with all of my people", whatever that is. Some not-my-people too - hence shocked initial reaction of "A queue? At one of my clubs?" - but they mostly seemed OK, and they weren't crowding the place to the point of unuseability like the cocking Neil Morrissey acolytes at the Noble. Though on that note - by 8 last night the Noble was back to its charming old self. I reckon we're OK on schoolnights because the new clutter are the sort who have to get up early to drive Tarquin and Jemima to extra classes.
Anyway, yes, Black Plastic. Awesomeness, to the extent that it even bled into the nightbus and made it a really jolly nightbus with Mamas and Papas singalongs and a man who said I looked like Paul Morley, which I can't say I'm 100% happy with but it at least gives me an excuse to extemporise Morley pastiches about buses, my face &c.
edit: And I forgot about the Acton Tubewalk! There was a prison and model aircraft and the Grand Union Canal where I poked a coconut with my umbrella.

Much discussion on the friendslist lately of cyclists who jump lights. Which plenty of them do, but I'm always more bothered by the cars and vans and trucks which do likewise. OK, they seldom come up to a light which is already red and then sail through as some two-wheelers seem to feel is their right, but counting an amber or even a new red as somehow not applicable, I see a lot of that. Often, I stare 'em down and walk through, subject to my assessment of just how much of a w@nker they are. Yesterday, I saw a woman who I don't think was doing that, but was walking across a pelican in Highgate Village, holding a baby, as the lights for traffic went red. And one man was in such a hurry to get wherever it was he was going that he damn near flattened the pair of them. Fortunately, some other passers by got his number. Unfortunately, even if that does go anywhere he's clearly not going to get the punishment he deserves of a five year driving ban at the very least.

I was as glad as anyone when I heard that BBC3's supernatural house-share tale Being Human was getting a full series - except much of what I liked about the pilot was the chemistry, and they've changed two thirds of the cast. They swap the ghost out for Sugar? Fine by me. If they'd lost Russell Tovey as the werewolf, I could have lived with that; instead, he stayed but now that he's more famous as a Young Gay Actor, he seems to feel obliged to be shriller. What I cannot fathom is that they lost that perfect, perfect Mitchell and brought in a generic vampire at precisely the time when any new screen vampire most needs to distinguish himself from the herd.

2009 has already brought two more disappointing albums from Bruce Springsteen, whose latest is one of those disappointingly lumpen efforts he seems to produce from time to time, and White Lies. I really enjoyed 'Death' in spite of suspecting there wasn't much to it; at album length that hollowness becomes inescapable, and horrible. After aforementioned let-downs, this is not shaping up to be a vintage year for music.

Yesterday I was handed a flyer for Czech mail-order brides, "unspoiled by feminism". Which is not just sleazy, but baffling. If you want the loaded and lonely, surely you flyer on Friday night as the City bars are chucking out, or in Knightsbridge tobacconists, not in Victoria on a Wednesday lunchtime?
Then again, this was shortly after I learned that Cardinal Place has a wind consultant called Professor Breeze, so it may just have been one of those days when plausibility goes out the window. Consider also the state of the Comedy that evening, where they had hybrid Hallowe'en/Christmas decorations up - so there's a werewolf menacing the tree, for instance, which has been decked with a string of skulls. I was there to see The Melting Ice Caps, aka Luxembourg's David Shah solo. And that is *solo* as in a one-man show, just him and a backing track (except for the two songs where he's joined by a flipbook wrangler). It can't be easy to stand up there and perform with no band, no instrument, no Dutch courage, not even any of the overacting and performance art techniques you'd get from someone like Simon Bookish, but he does it - stands there and sings his songs, beautiful songs about love and time and making the best of it all. Lovely, if heartbreaking - both for the songs in and of themselves, and that this is happening at half eight in a pub basement, rather than in the grand setting it deserves.
So of course because it's an implausible day, why wouldn't he be followed by a band with Foxy Brown on vocals, a total Shoreditch refugee on rhythm guitar and one of the From Dusk 'Til Dawn vampires on histrionic lead?

Newsarama are running a pretty revealing ten-part interview with Grant Morrison about All-Star Superman, one of the best superhero comics ever. I post this for the fans but seriously, even if you're only a casual/Greatest Hits comics reader, even if you think you don't like Superman, I don't blame you but this is the exception.

I finally remembered to check for an update on the story about the pirates stealing 30 tanks, which has been driven from the news by the small matter of the world's economy falling over and bursting into flames. Apparently:
"United States warships have surrounded the Faina for weeks to prevent the pirates from trying to unload the weapons, and a Russian guided missile frigate is traveling to the area."
It was seized a month ago! If the Russian navy is always this slow, we have so little to worry about from Putin.

For anyone given to complaining about txtspk as part of the decline of modern literacy &c, I give you 1880s emoticons.

I never wanted an MP3 player - I worried about being cut off from the world by it, losing my radar and becoming one of the bovine obstacle people. But offered one free, I could hardly refuse, and I'm finding it slots into my life pretty well. I still don't wear it all the time - not if I'm reading something complicated on the Tube, not if I'm somewhere especially crowded, not if I'm somewhere with its own music, whether accidental (a park) or deliberate (a bar). I keep it low enough to hear the world (and it would hurt to have it loud enough to drown out the Victoria Line), but that's still high enough to soundtrack me. Which means I have to be careful what I put on it, because not every soundtrack is the hero's; Robyn Hitchcock on Upper Street at night made me feel like the first victim in an oblique slasher flick. Nor have I quite adapted to hearing people I know singing quite so intimately. But if nothing else, it was the perfect accompaniment when I went along for a spot of disaster tourism the day after the Great Fire of Camden; I'd still yet to work out how to choose tracks properly, but what should come on as I considered the smoking shell of the Hawley Arms but 'This Is How You Spell "Hahaha We Destroyed The Hopes And Dreams Of A Generation Of Faux-Romantics"'.

I finished this weekend with a nagging sense of underachievment, which is foolish really; if I lazed around a lot, that was largely down to ruin resulting from two grand nights out, and I still managed to get the last 200 pages of Gravity's Rainbow read. I'm glad I read it, though I'm not sure if I could intelligently say much about it yet; perhaps my back brain will have finished processing the torrent of information in a month, or a year, or three. Or not. The problem with which this leaves me is, what to read next? I like a change, but GR covers so many bases, what does that leave from my To Read pile? The Glass Books Of The Dream-Eaters is another kinky trans-European conspiracy romp. John M Ford's The Dragon Waiting is another unreal epic of European war, while The Unfree French will take me right back to the moral destructiveness of the Second World War. Even Tim Moore's fluffy Do Not Pass Go is a psychogeography of London, like Gravity's first section - albeit by way of Monopoly rather than V2 impacts.
So far I seem to be attempting to read them all. I'm not sure that's wise.

Next time somone complains about BBC3, set Being Human on them. Reviews mostly seem to be comparing it (unfavourably) to Buffy, but I suspect that's because it has supernatural creatures in a modern setting without quite being horror, and most reviewers are lazy. Impressively, for such a crowded field as the modern vampire story, it managed within an hour to establish a tone that was all its own, but if I had to reference it I'd say it's more Ultraviolet meets Spaced. The conclusion was rather naff, but that was the only mis-step; I loved the balance between the domestic comedy and the menace (the latter especially coming out in that description of the afterlife).
Note also that it's picked up a star and a writer from Doctor Who, already shaping up as the Kevin Bacon of 21st century British TV.