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

Been playing Space Crusade again, after a gap of a couple of decades. Back then, I imagine people thought it would lose its appeal once I worked up the courage to talk to girls. More fool them.

Align is a tricky one to classify; not quite a play, nor a lecture. Call it a performance, it's probably as close as we'll get. Taking place, perfectly, mere yards from the actual Bridewell, it is a story of London's sacred geography which never gets too swivel-eyed, is far more 'wouldn't that be interesting?' than making foolhardy statements about what is or isn't true - and yet feels none the less mystical for all that. Rather than hang around afterwards, I feel driven to strike out along the Strand Ley about which we've just been hearing, and it's all delightfully numinous until I hit the smell of a freshers' event at the LSE. I doubt the bacchanals of our ancestors were any more fragrant, but I can edit that detail out of my daydreams.
Also tricky to classify: Neil Gaiman reading his new book Fortunately, The Milk, with Chris Riddell illustrating it live. Already a little multimedia, but then you have it being acted out and sung and generally turned into something quite its own creature through the assistance of TV Smith, Tom Robinson, Mitch Benn, Lenny Henry, Tori Amos' daughter, Andrew O'Neill, and Faith from 'Jimmy's End' (who is much less haunted when she's playing a pirate queen, so that's handy).

Lots of gigs by the people whose gigs I see a lot - to whose ranks the Soft Close-Ups were temporarily restored when augstone was briefly allowed back in the country. Neither show was quite as melancholy as the Sunday afternoon show a few months back, but still, when on a wet Wednesday night they played their adaptation of that Housman poem about death (tautology, I know), any plans I had for a straight edge gig crumbled. Good suppors at both shows, too - Parenthesisdotdotdot, aka Tim from Baxendale dressed as the chap from Dr Caligari, and Marcus Reeves, who is essentially my friend dr_shatterhand playing Marc Almond. At the latter show they also had me returning to the wheels of steel for the first time in some years. I always did prefer playing quieter sets. ( Read more... )

Other shows have been further from my usual orbit:
Martin Newell playing his annual show in a converted Colchester church in the shadow of the appropriately-named Jumbo water tower, bearing a curious resemblance to William Hartnell as a Teddy Boy pirate. He's a charmingly shambolic raconteur, an occasional ranter, and a mostly mediocre poet, but once he's singing, oh, the songs.
A violinist plays Bach in another church, this time right on the border of the City. I conclude that Bach may be the music to whose condition art is said to aspire.
A distinctly white trio, playing the hipster pub sat incongruously opposite the East London Mosque, play a nameless and heavily highlife-influenced jam. Against all odds, it works.
In a bar inexplicably decorated with biscuits stuck to bricks, a jazz band have one singer who thinks Seasick Steve is a role model rather than a terrible warning about the gullibility of authenticity bores. But the other singer sounds far more like Billie Holiday than any modern Briton has a right to.
(And because you can't win them all, there was also the act who appeared to be Jack Whitehall fronting Reef)

On Monday, as you may have seen in the papers, I went to Stationery Club (although obviously the paper is incorrect in its assertion that I was drinking beer. As ever, it's left to the bloggers to correct Old Media's mistakes). I'm not even that fussed about Post-its, really. But a live videochat with one of the inventors? That's a big deal. There was one point I'd have liked to raise, but I didn't really formulate it properly. Still haven't, in fact. But it goes something like this: there was a Spider-Man story years back, addressing the issue of why someone who could concoct that web fluid without proper lab facilities should be working hand-to-mouth as a photographer when he was clearly a brilliant chemist. So Peter Parker goes into a chemical company and they say, sorry, there's no market use for an incredibly strong adhesive which disappears without trace after an hour. Now, that's self-evidently nonsense, but even if it weren't, the example of Post-its - a use being sought out for a very poor adhesive, creating a product which, if unnecessary, is very lucrative - would disprove it. I suppose I was simply interested in whether Geoff Nicholson was aware of that. Instead, I just ended up with Post-its on my face, my pint and (in one weak visual pun) a heart on my sleeve.

Tuesday: the debut Proper London show by Bevan 17 or, as they're ludicrously claiming to be called in what is obviously a sop to steve586's rampant ego, If.... The fourth full stop there was to end the sentence, I'm not sure whether that's correct form in such cases or not. Normal practice on liking a band is to compare them to other bands one likes - and I suppose there is a little One More Grain in there, not that I have any reason to believe any of Bevan 17 have heard One More Grain, few enough people did. But mainly I am reminded of bands I don't quite like, fixed. I always thought the Fall might be quite good if they weren't fronted by a bus station tramp; here it's exliontamer instead, who is eminently presentable and well-spoken. Or Stereolab - I like 'French Disko', but otherwise found them just a bit too Gallic and inert. If they weren't, they might have ended up somewhere near here. They cover John Cooper Clarke with a Scott Walker intro, and get away with it. They come up with the second riff on PIL's "anger is an energy" that I've heard in one afternoon, and even though I really like Pagan Wanderer Lu, Bevan 17's is better.

And last night I played a frankly shambolic game of 40K, but the less said about that the better. So instead I should probably record how much I loved Michael Moorcock's Gloriana, or the Unfullfil'd Queen, a dialogue with Spenser that anticipates Camille Paglia's thoughts on Spenser as precursor to de Sade. I knew Moorcock and Angela Carter had something of a mutual appreciation society going, love across the genre barricades, but even given the pantomime matriarch Ma Cornelius, this is the first time I've read a Moorcock book which I can imagine Angela Carter writing - "the palace glares with a thousand colours in the sunlight, shimmers constantly in the moonlight, its walls appearing to undulate, its roofs to rise and fall like a glamorous tide, its towers and minarets lifting like the masts and hulks of sinking ships". Not that I don't love his outright fantasy and SF, but this would be a great introduction for those more sceptical of such things. So long as they don't mind a fair amount of rather abtruse filth along the way.

This one's going to get geeky, so let's start by establishing that yes, I do sometimes engage in more socially well-adjusted activities. Well, if you can count going to the V&A (they have so much pretty stuff, but what is it *for* when lots of that stuff would be equally at home in the British Museum?), or attending a Britpop night in a Geneva t-shirt, or hanging out with fugitivemotel and at one stage uttering the phrase "Oz Season 7, starring Wizbit". And OK, at the party I attended on Saturday I did have a conversation about the Sisters of Mercy's much-better-than-other-bands-called-Sisters cover of 'Comfortably Numb'. So yes, it would seem I am in fact a hopeless case. Oh well.

It was September when I last posted a general State of the Comics Union moan. Since when, not much has changed. I've dropped an increasing number of series which, even if I vaguely want to read, I know I'll never want to reread. More are coming - when Astonishing X-Men and Ultimate Avengers reach the end of the current stories, they're out, because they're not bad little superhero romps but nor are they worth more than a quick read courtesy of the library and, if I've mis-guessed what the library will get in, I'll live. Buffy was in line for the same treatment after the sheer galling idiocy both of the identity of the season's Big Bad, and of the manner in which said identity was revealed (online via fake leak, not in the comic itself) - but Joss Whedon wrote the most recent issue himself and reminded me that it was seldom the big stories which made Buffy so much as the little moments, and this was they. Of course, the next arc is by Brad Meltzer and is going to have a Mature Readers warning, between which and his previous work we can doubtless expect some gratuitously rapey mess which gets me right back to quitsville.
But there's just so much coasting going on - and miserable coasting at that. Both DC and Marvel claim that a bright new direction is coming once the grim'n'gritty carnage of current events is done, but I've heard it all before (and I'm barely been reading anything from DC in ages, they're in such a joyless tangle). At Marvel what seemed like a brilliant idea for a while (businessman Norman Osborn aka the Green Goblin talked himself out of responsibility for his crimes and ended up effectively running the country, as the very rich always seem to manage - ring any bells, bankers?) has just been plodding on and on and remorselessly on. And now it has finally reached its endgame - Osborn and his forces attacking Asgard, home of Thor and his fellow gods, which J Michael Straczynski's run on Thor had relocated to Oklahoma. But the comic telling this story, Siege, feels from its first issue more like it's going through the motions of amending the status quo than like the epic story it should be. Brian Bendis, the writer, has previously had problems with the pacing in the middle acts of his big event comics, and this one was shorter so should have been better, but it's as if he's cut not the padded kidriff, but the kick-ass opening.
There's still good stuff, of course; of the titles I praised in September, Ultimate Spider-Man and The Boys are still delivering. The Walking Dead gets better and better, and I don't even much like zombie stories. Vertigo, previously responsible for Sandman, Preacher and The Invisibles among others, has become relevant again with Mike Carey's The Unwritten and Peter Milligan's Greek Street, two very different examinations of the unexpected legacy legends and fictions can have in the modern world. But, will either of them last? The economics of comics are so horribly marginal, it can never be guaranteed; both writers have a string of prematurely-cancelled titles behind them. Word of another casualty has just come in; Phonogram's Kieron Gillen has been doing some lovely work on a space-based screwball comedy X-Men spin-off called S.W.O.R.D., but weak sales mean it ends with the fifth issue. Meanwhile, he's trying his best on Thor but the aforementioned Straczysnki run left him with having to pick up from such a moronic start point (Latveria Is So Bracing!)* that he's really swimming against the current.
Another writer I usually think of as reliably great, Grant Morrison, is in more position to be master of his fate and work, but isn't really putting it to best use. His Batman & Robin hasn't maintained its strong start, getting bogged down in themes he's already done better elsewhere; I feel a real lack of anticipation for the imminent Joe the Barbarian; and as for his Authority...well, OK, it's not really his anymore. It's Keith Giffen scripting Morrison's plots, because Grant stormed off in a huff. And Giffen's a competent enough writer, usually, but it turns out that he can't write British. So Morrison's most thoroughly, heartbreakingly British lead since Greg Feely in The Filth now talks about leaving things in his other 'pants', and his first 'apartment'. The issue of The Boys set amidst the baguette-jousting inhabitants of the village of Franglais had a better ear for dialect than this.

And as if that little diatribe weren't bad enough, today the main thing lifting me out of the sense of 'meh' which comes with this horrible sinus-y cold is the storming victory my new-look Tyranid army managed in last night's game of Warhammer 40,000.

*I love Babylon 5 - mostly - but JMS' comics career has been one frustration after another. Either he loses the plot, or he falls out with the publisher and storms off, or in extreme cases, both. People told me his Thor was excellent but having been burned before, I waited. And I finally read the first two collections recently and lo and behold, this was one of the cases of 'both'. There's a lot to love: instead of talking in cod-Shakespearean English as previous writers so clumsily attempted, his Asgardians speak formally but coherently; it's the themes which echo Shakespeare now, with the prince uneasy on his father's throne, the adviser who whispers poison in a good but naive ear. And the abiding question: what do gods do when their legend is over? If they survived Ragnarok, what now? Yes, in a sense it would have been a better theme back in those days when we were told we'd seen the End of History, but it's still a fascinating one.
However. There are scenes in post-Katrina New Orleans and war-torn Africa which demonstrate that Straczynski hasn't learned a damn thing since his legendarily bad Amazing Spider-Man issue where Doctor Doom stood in the wreckage of the World Trade Centre and wept. And, though I've yet to read the third volume which fully explains how he got to where he left the series, I've seen enough to know that yes, what looked like a stupid idea which Gillen was obliged to pick up, was also a stupid idea approached from the other end.

It's a week since I updated - well, except to have an IT spasm* - and I'm not entirely sure why, because it's not like I've been short of things to report. I've seen my first of the new generation of 3D films, Coraline, and been impressed with how well the technology works, and how it doesn't just feel like a gimmick - whichever industry suit it was who said that if it wasn't quite the new sound, it was maybe the new colour, was for once not talking hype crap. I've finally been in a boat on Finsbury Park lake, and am glad to know that I can still just about row. I've found an opportunity to take direct action against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while en route to Richmond of all places, where I then received an eye-opening tour of the local attractions. I've played Necrons. I went to a revivalist goth club where my trousers melted - not that I was wearing them at the time - and it became clear that apparently all female goth vocals of the Batcave period either were, or sounded like, Siouxsie. I've discovered a splendid little venue within walking distance which seems to have a full programme of rockabilly-type stuff, because the Deptford Beach Babes were doing their surftastic thing there. And I've started the new Glen David Gold, which is thus far every bit as thrilling and beautiful and capacious as Carter Beats The Devil, itself one of the very few books I'm happy to recommend to pretty much anyone.

Further to recent discussions of SF writer Alfred Bester, I was surprised to learn while looking up something totally different that not only had he written for comics back in the 'Golden Age', but he created immortal supervillain Vandal Savage, something of a role model of mine. And the only other comics note which springs to mind is that while I don't think Garth Ennis' Boys spin-off Herogasm merits quite the appalled reception it got at yesterday's picnic, it does put one of my reservations about the parent series at centre stage. This is a world where superheroes are, almost without exception, utter bastards behind closed doors - degnerates, pawns of corporate interests, murderers, the lot. Our protagonists are the shady squad who keep them in check. Well, that's a good premise. But these heroes never seem to do anything useful - there are no real threats against which they serve. All we've seen so far is a rather cackhanded attempt to intervene on September 11th 2001. And I think that goes a little too far, and detracts from the strength of the story. If all the alien invasions and such are wholly fraud, spin and cover-up, it becomes rather one-note. I'd be more interested in the story of superpowered individuals who really are Earth's last line of defence, and also complete bastards. More dramatic tension than if they're solely and entirely tossers.

*Speaking of which, I was watching some early Buffy yesterday, for the first time in ages (and don't they all look so young?), and there was a terribly sad bit where Buffy asks Giles whether life gets easier, and he asks if she wants the truth and she replies, as per the episode title, '"Lie to me". And we were discussing this and I concluded that it doesn't get easier per se, but it's a bit like getting used to a horribly buggy piece of software - you gradually learn more of the tricks and workarounds, and get more adept, but of course this just makes it even more jarring when some new glitch arises.

Last night's Skins: I'm not saying it was my favourite episode ever, or even of the new series so far, but it was nonetheless brilliant. Without once becoming A Very Special Episode, or the sort of didactic slop a US teen show would usually give us, we get something which I'd wager will make at least a few kids up and down the country think twice before they parrot their Mail-reading parents' line on immigrants. And while the scum might object to Skins because it's all sex and drugs and electro-indie, how many of them realise that it's not only undermining their anti-fun stance, but also their intolerance? Heroic.
In other scandalous but socially conscious TV news, by finishing the third season of Oz I've caught up to where I started. No more left for me to watch - well, except the musical episode, for which C4's scheduling went from merely wasteful to actively hiding an episode in a slot previously announced for something else, but I'm not sure I want to watch through all the intervening bits again just yet.

"Londoners escape heavy snowfall", apparently. Yeah, so rather than a winter wonderland outside my window, it's the sort of formless and apparently infinite muddy grey which makes me wonder whether it's even worth leaving the house today. What an escape!

As if recent reactivation of my old Warhammer 40K habit weren't bad enough, last night I learned how to play Heroclix. I know that geek is cool these days, but I still can't help but worry whether I'm going too far. Speaking of cool geeks: Scott Pilgrim! The new instalment is strangely downbeat in places, but also a thing of wonder. I only bought it on a whim because it was a slow comics week, and yet I still got the limited edition bookplate. This is because I am wonderful.