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

On facing pages of Saturday's paper: competitors in a race complain that it is too fast, and parishioners outraged when their vicar quotes the Bible. For comparison, yesterday I sat down to watch Primer. I did this in the full knowledge that first time writer/director/producer/star Shane Carruth had made it with $7,000, a script more wibbly-wobbly and timey-wimey than Steven Moffat's finest, and a commitment to the philosophy of 'fvck the average viewer' which makes David Simon look like a commissioning exec for ITV1. But I knew these things going in, because I am not entirely stupid, and when the film did indeed prove rather hard to follow I did not complain, because I am not a whining tw@t.
(Once you've checked online to see how the plot untangles, though, it is very good - which is more than one can say for the olympics, or christianity. Possibly the best screen effort I've ever encountered to imagine how time travel might begin and work in the real world, using something close to the orthodox physics of the matter)

Otherwise, a weekend for farewells. On Saturday, the New Royal Family abdicated after a typically energetic but strangely elegiac show. And because it was their last, and because the supports included two with social overlap and one who were Proxy Music, a fairly good proportion of 'everyone I have ever met' was there. Some of whom I thought must have known each other but did not, so I was at least able to introduce them and feel there were beginnings to balance out the ending. I think in the end it felt more celebratory than not, but still a sad day. Not least because the previous night had been the end of another era. Not that you can ever definitively pronounce a death in comics, but the last issue of Phonogram for the foreseeable was out, and the creators were dressed for a wake. It's an atypical issue, too, addressing something I had wondered about - in Phonogram's frame of reference, is there anyone who really likes music but isn't a phonomancer? And of course the answer is nothing so simple as yes or no, more like 'magic happens'. It's the counterbalance to last issue and Lloyd's over-intellectualisation, to the point of being almost wordless. It is also wonderful, but by now you probably guessed I was going to say that.
Anyway, that was one issue, but due to overwhelming public demand* let's take a look at the rest of ( the last two weeks' comics. Includes legitimate use of the phrase PIRATE BATMAN! )
And since I started writing all this, I've learned of another exit - The 18 Carat Love Affair will be playing one more show, then bowing out. Sad times.

"I read naturalistic novels and they seem to me to be written by people who read too many naturalistic novels. They just seem to be full of convention, that’s all." - Will Self, from a very good interview which also explores his feelings on cities (more negative than I can agree with, but he couldn't write his books without them), the degree to which the novel's self-definition against film is obsolescent, and his sense of his own work's weakness. I know that the failings of the naturalistic novel are something of a hobby horse for me, but I was reminded just how limited a genre naturalism is the other day when a friend mentioned, quite legitimately, that the film she thought had best mirrored her own recent work experience was Tropic Thunder.

*By which I mean it got one comment, which is more than the entirety of Friday's post, so it's comparatively true.

Greatly enjoyed Stay Beautiful on Saturday, though it's strange being at the eighth birthday when you remember the first night so clearly, feeling like some sort of elder statesman of glitter, even down to being startled at the younger generation's excitement over the Powerpuff Girls theme because it's slipped your mind that it doesn't get a regular airing anymore...

Julien Temple's Pandaemonium has little on its Wikipedia or IMDB pages to flag it up as Romantic Poetry - the Hollywood Years, but by blazes it should. All IMDB manages is to flag up the anachronistic jet-trails in the sky during the balloon ride, having perhaps not also spotted various other modern features throughout the film, intended to convey a sense of Coleridge as a prophet whose visionary powers (and opium habit) cast him loose from time - even though the opening scene says as much, explicitly, in among some astonishing camerawork. And there is a lot of that, and it does make a change from the normal slavish biopic template of which I am so, so bored. But plotwise...Linus Roache's Coleridge is the brave rebel, undone by opium but still a visionary hero - no mention here of that government job in Malta, or of the boringly conventional strain in his criticism. John Hannah's Wordsworth is a vindictive hack, almost incapable of writing - even 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' is here his sister's suggestion. Wordsworth is the person from Porlock and, not content with that, later convinces Coleridge to burn 'Kubla Khan' in spite of Lord Byron's efforts to huy and publish it. But! All is well. For Wordsworth's loyal sister, although also reduced to a wreck by the dastardly sell-out, remembers the poem in its entirety! In your face, Wordsworth! Of course, to better emphasise the picture we get no quotes from Wordsworth's few genuinely great poems, while all the Coleridge quotations are from two of the three masterpieces he produced over a poetic career which was broadly acceptable but unexceptional.
There is a grand tale to be told in the relationship of Wordsworth and Coleridge - I picture something like HBO's John Adams. This hero vs villain melodrama is not it. Although it turns out that the bit about Southey writing the original Goldilocks story is pretty much true. Who knew?

Have never quite known whether I should investigate the works of WG Sebald. I like psychogeographical odysseys - but these ones get good reviews in the literary pages, such that I suspect them, and the tone of self-indulgent wispiness which seems to get literary fiction types all hot under the collar sounds stronger here than elsewhere in the genre. Will Self's short essay on Sebald would, I hoped, decide me one way or the other, but no. still up in the air. And in a world with so many books, when you can't decide whether you're likely to like one, then it's better to read one you're pretty sure you will. Once I'm finished on the current crop of books - and that could take a while - I think it's flying cities in space for me, rather than lonely trudges around East Anglia.