'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.

Well, after some pretty half-arsed efforts over the past hour or so, the rain looks to be picking up to a proper bank holiday level now, and any plans of sitting in the park are dissolving nicely in it; a game of Gloom would mark the day better than a dance around the maypole. Yesterday, though, was lovely; after 18 Carat Love Affair's set (including hospitalsoup's second best 'Pink Glove' cover) we fled Sexy Kid (remarkably, worse than their name suggests) and a definition of Britpop which encompassed Finley Quaye (though also, to their credit, Ultrasound's 'I'll Show You Mine') for Tavistock Square and the sun, from which it's a lovely walk through the backstreets to Fleet Street (why didn't I know London had a pub called The Knights Templar?) to Fleet Street, where Mr Punch serves ruinously tasty West Country cider, the rogue.

If you want to get overexcited about the new Grant Morrison multiverse comic, or just want to see a picture of Batman punching out Rorschach, click here.

I find myself worrying that Charlie Brooker might be the new Bill Hicks - ie, awesome, and usually right, but too easily quoted in too many situations in a way which makes the over-quoter seem a bit of a prick. And I'm as guilty of this as anyone, and I think maybe I need to scale it back a bit. Except why did this revelation hit me in the same week he returns to our TV screens? Ah, my timing.

Philipp Blom's The Vertigo Years aims to overturn the idea that the first 14 years of the twentieth century were a peaceful, if shadowed, idyll, the last days of the old world before the wars and revolutions made the modern world. Like most history with an agenda, the hand is overplayed, but if only as a counterbalance, it's a valuable take on how much was as new and strange and unsettling a hundred years ago as whatever's causing the latest panic now. More than the old 'how very similar then was to now' trick, though, it was little details which caught my attention. Wooden ships of the line, Trafalgar-style, when would you think the last of those was launched by the Royal Navy? 1879. The creator of Bambi also wrote p0rn (I'm surprised that didn't somehow make it into Lost Girls, though the Rite of Spring riot is here in detail). The borders between 'a very long time ago' and 'a long time ago', in other words, are as permeable as those between 'the old days' and 'I remember when'. Oh, and while I knew the Belgians had been utter gits in the Congo, I had no idea the death toll was ten million. Hitler gets all the press, but he doesn't even have the twentieth century's second highest total for genocide by a European ruler. Lightweight.

Obviously it's great news that Grant Morrison is back with Frank Quitely for (some of) the new Batman & Robin comic, and that he's getting to continue with Seaguy and do a Multiverse book and various other bits and pieces. But..."I’ve just been doing an Earth Four book, which is the Charlton characters but I’ve decided to write it like “Watchmen.” [laughs] So it’s written backwards and sideways and filled with all kinds of symbolism". It was obvious from the first time we glimpsed Earth Four in 52 that it was very much a Dark Charlton world, playing up the Watchmen correspondences; they even showed Peacemaker in a window as a nod to the exit of his analogue, the Comedian. I assumed that world would be used in passing for the sort of third-stringer-written continuity frottage that makes up so much of DC's output - it may have cropped up in Countdown for all I know, and that was very much the sort of place where I assumed it would stay. Morrison's use of a multiversal Captain Atom as a Dr Manhattan piss-take in Superman Beyond...well, it was one of the weakest things in there, but it was forgivable. A whole series, though? Morrison is the second best comics writer in the world. Moore has pretty much departed comics. Is it not about time that Morrison got over the anxiety of influence?
(In arguably related news, I swear our team could have done better at the pub quiz last night had it not been for the distractingly cute girl two tables over with a copy and a badge of Watchmen)

Last week I was asked to write something about my journey, and it turned out rather well, so in the parlance of Nu-Facebook, I thought I might 'share': ( Stroud Green )

Anyone know how to find the Search toolbar in Mediaplayer? I didn't even know there was one, but having seen it in action I want it, yet am experiencing IT Fail in finding it. Hurrah for pressing random buttons.

I was unaware until I happened past it on Tuesday, but there's a new Book & Comic Exchange branch in Soho, just up from the MVE on Berwick Street. Which isn't quite so bursting-at-the-seams as Notting Hill yet, but I still got a pretty good haul - the Spider-Man's Tangled Web collection with the Garth Ennis/John McCrea and Peter Milligan/Duncan Fegredo stories for £3, the one issue I was missing from the Morrison/Millar Flash run (a rather lovely Jay Garrick one-shot, 'Still Life In The Fast Lane'), and an issue of Warren Ellis' Doctor Strange run. Except it turns out he only did plot, not script, and what's the point of a Warren Ellis comic without inventive insults? The whole thing is a bit of a mess, though, even with some of the art coming from Mark Buckingham; it was part of the Marvel Edge line, which was Marvel's attempt to get some of that Vertigo action, which is here represented by such cringeworthy details as Strange's cloak being replaced with an Overcoat of Levitation...
I was in that neck of the woods because I'd been invited to lunch at a health food place in Covent Garden. Accepting which, and then being off the sauce all day, was clearly foolishness, because last night I was quite as ill as I've been in years. ( TMI ) And of course, when your time's your own then sick days lack even the compensatory charms they hold for workers.
Before this kicked in, though, I also had chance to make my first visit to the Wallace Collection, which I think maybe made a better home than it makes a museum. The stuff they have is generally the sort of stuff which makes for a good background, rather than something I wish to stand and contemplate - although the gender balance amuses me, rooms of arms and armour balanced by all that froofy Rococo stuff.

Won the pub quiz jackpot on Monday, but only just - we were exactly as far off the tie-break as one other team, and then in the tie-break tie-break, which was essentially guessing a random date, we were only one day closer than them. Perhaps it was the tension of that which undid me last night? Nah, I'm still blaming the so-called healthy living.

edit: More comics news just in - DC Announces 'After Watchmen - What's Next?' Program? And it has been amazing me how the Watchmen trade is now *everywhere*, although that is a mainly happy amazement as opposed to some people's reaction, so this is a smart move. So what comics are DC suggesting as the next step?( Read more... )Whenever I think DC might be regaining some small fragment of the plot, they pull a stunt like this.