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

The TV version of The Walking Dead is very, very well-done but - for my purposes - entirely pointless. I'm way further on in the story than this early, funny stuff. I want to know what happens to Rick next, not see a variant edition of what happened to him way back when. Perhaps if the comic ever ends and I'm not getting my regular fix, I'll come back and watch the DVDs, but for now? Surplus to requirements. Obviously I'm glad it exists, earning the creators money and getting new people into the comic, and I'm not faulting the craftsmanship, but I won't be persevering, and I suspect that after this experience I also won't be bothering with the TV Game of Thrones.

It was a good weekend for picnics, but I also made one deeply peculiar trip to Acton (which is essentially a small provincial town that happens to be on the Tube). I assumed the pub the Indelicates were playing would be something like the Windmill, but it was a quiet, wooden pub downstairs with the gig in a function room up top, and at first I thought I had inadvertently wandered into a private party for children. I briefly thought I might not be the oldest person there, before realising that the chap with the impressive 'tache was the promoter's dad, and he was going downstairs for a nice quiet pint. The supports were both fairly generic, but that's forgivable in teenagers, and they had good enough voices that hey, maybe in two bands' time they'll be worth another listen. I got ID'd, simply because they were IDing everyone, but my weary, disbelieving glare was apparently sufficient proof of age, so I got my black wristband OK. The DJs did play some young people's music, but a lot of it was stuff like Cornershop, which I suppose is the same to them as the Clash were for clubs in my teens. And then there was the bit where a girl who didn't like the moshing came to stand with us, and we were a bit puzzled at the proximity until we realised she was swallowing her pride and going to stand with the grown-ups where it was calmer...I mean, as if I hadn't been feeling old enough already from having met my Cthulhuchild in the afternoon (and presented him with a cuddly Cthulhu - you know how some third-rate religions don't like their deities depicted? That's 'cos those religions' deities know they don't look cool enough). And it hit me during conversation with Simon that I have now lived for longer than there was between the end of World War II and my birth. Bloody Hell.
So the set...I think it was the first time I've seen 'Roses' live, and it didn't disappoint. Given the crowd I was surprised they didn't play 'Sixteen' or 'We Hate The Kids' (even though these were clearly nice kids, they could have done with the warning about their peers and their future). The absence of 'Jerusalem', though, made perfect sense, given most of the crowd would have been too young to vote in last May's debacle.
In summary: dear heavens I felt old. But cool old. Mostly.

The Runaways is not entirely free of the standard rock biopic and My Drug Hell tropes. But coming straight after attempts to watch Synechdoche, New York and Outkast's Idlewild, both of which have a bit of novel surface detail but are otherwise almost wholly cliche, it at least felt lively. Yes, I may be biased in favour of a film which has scenes of punked-up, drugged-up sapphism set to songs from the first Stooges album, but I still wouldn't have expected two Twilight alumni* to be quite so convincing as Joan Jett and Cherie Currie. Svengali Mick Foley isn't bad, either. Well, he is - he's a diabolical sleazeball, but still someone I could see myself taking as a management guru, especially when his heckler drill for the girls in the band is so reminiscent of the wrenches scene from Dodgeball.

*Of whom Dakota Fanning was also Satsuki in Totoro, which when you see her using her impossible platform boots to crush up pills for ease of snorting, and inevitably looking like a great ad for drugs while she does it, is really quite wrong.

Not that Nuisance ever sees much in the way of sobriety, but everyone seemed even drunker than usual on Friday; possibly because I'd already been for drinks beforehand at T Bird (which is good again! Hurrah), within an hour of arrival I found myself thinking what a beautiful ceiling the Monarch has. Yeah. That aside, it was largely a picnicky sort of weekend, the greyness of this August notwithstanding; on Saturday I was in Kensington Gardens with Stationery Club, and Sunday was Brumfields in Highgate Woods. Both had plenty of comedy passing dogs (especially Brumfields, where one joined in most tenaciously with a game of frisbee, and another snaffled two Jammy Dodgers in one mouthful), and other Local Colour en route. Alongside the Serpentine I saw a teenager on a penny farthing with no idea how to get off, and someone on rollerblades using an umbrella as a sail; in Highgate I was asked for directions by an unusually attractive tranny just as the Passage's polymorphously perverse 'XOYO' started up on the headphones. Then later, back along a Parkland Walk which seemed oddly still, even where someone was playing woodwind - not apparently for money - under one of the darker bridges.

Watched two films the last couple of days, both sequels which don't require any familiarity with the original, both featuring possession by ectoplasmic mists. And that's about all they have in common apart from being damn good. Evil Dead 2 is a gleefully gory romp, man versus the supernatural presented as almost slapstick. Whereas Hellboy II - which feels much more like a Guillermo del Toro film than its predecessor, even though he directed them both - is a terribly sad and elegiac thing in amongst all the fighting and 'aw, crap'; every monster vanquished is a strange and wonderful thing which has now passed from the Earth, and when Hellboy is being tempted by the genocidal elf-prince (played, bizarrely but very well, by Luke from Bros), you at least half-want him to go for it.

I remember Jimmy McGovern's The Lakes being much-discussed in the nineties, mainly in terms of the sex. For whatever reason, I never saw it, but on a free trial of one of those DVD rental services I thought, well, John Simm stars, has to at least be worth a look, right? Only problem is, Simm is playing a scouser. Within minutes of his arrival in the Lake District, he's twice faced prejudice over this - ah, thinks I, this is about him showing the locals not all scousers are feckless gobshites. Except it rapidly becomes clear that he is; he's a thieving, idle little weasel who gets a local girl pregnant and whose compulsive gambling leads to the death of three kids. And Simm is still at least a little charming, but he gets that whiny voice down pat enough to almost extinguish it. Oh, I forgot to mention the music, which is like some nightmarish antimatter universe Nuisance; in the first episode alone, two major emotional scenes are soundtracked by Cast. There are some fine performances - especially the village priest - and lovely touches (some business with milk-sniffing, threaded lightly through the whole show, is astonishing) but overall it's a nasty, mean little show. And I really don't get why even my hormonal peers thought it was sexy.

Further to the Making Of post, here's me killing zombies in the video for Brontosaurus Chorus' 'Louisiana'. And following up on my Spotify question, which got a lot of very helpful answers from musicians I know, it turns out that even someone at the level of fame of Robert Fripp is not making an acceptable amount of money from the service.

Watching David Attenborough's Life (though I'm an episode behind so no spoilers), one of the main things which strikes me is how stupid creationists are. I'm not just talking about the way in which these animals are themselves evidence for nature as an evolving, changing thing (especially now we can see them learning new techniques, the monkeys in particular so human when they dry seeds before breaking them between stone hammer and anvil). I mean the way that the Argument from Design crumbles because, while there are all sorts of creator you could potentially infer from the nature on this planet, the god of the christians is not among them. That wacky Old Testament guy, maybe, just - he liked his carnage, after all. But no god of love could be responsible for the komodo dragons trailing their poisoned buffalo victim, prodding him with their tongues to see if he's weak enough to eat yet. Or how about the flies which inflate their own heads, and then their eyestalks, for mating display? Some kind of insectoid Tom of Finland might have made them, but that's not who the creationists preach. Hell, their chap seems to like monogamy, so one has to question what he was doing when he made hippos, where one big hippo gets the best bit of the river and all the females, and the other male hippos get sod all. I guess a mormon or muslim creationist might be able to use that, but a mainstream christian? Not so much.

alasdair drew my attention to something really fvcked up - and we're talking more fvcked up than a pocket black hole here - "My original art has been copied by a manufacturer who is now suing me in federal court to overturn my existing copyrights and continue making knockoffs. I have a strong case, a great lawyer and believe that if I can continue to defend myself, the case will be resolved in my favor. If I run out of funds before we reach trial, a default judgment would be issued against me and could put me out of business." In other words, who dares [sue first], wins, so long as they've got deep enough pockets. Not that I'm in a position to help this guy out but I really hope this spreads wide enough that he gets the support he needs and the thieving, devious wretches who are trying to pull one over on him get taken to the cleaners.

Just when I think I can forgive the inability to kill off characters and the 'ah - but is it?' moral reversals and the need to have even Hiro, who used to understand what was going on, act like a total div - they compound the total misuse of Jamie Hector aka Marlo from The Wire (sapped of all the menace we know he can exude as easy as breathing, even though he's meant to be a fear-vampire supervillain) by bringing in Bubs as a man who creates black holes. No. Just no. Maybe I didn't get my comics today, maybe No Heroics is finished with no word yet on whether it'll be back, but while we teeter on the brink of a recession I could be watching Carnivale; as America prepares to make the most important choice of a generation I could be watching John Adams; with no particular topical relevance, but with considerably more entertainment value than Heroes nonetheless, I could be catching up with last night's Dead Set. I do not need to be wasting my time with this network dreck.

In other news: twoi - when twee meets Oi!

Soul Mole tonight, hurrah! And happy birthday to all the birthday people, also.

Like all great zombie stories, the message of 28 Weeks Later is that, while humans may not be much improved by undeath, they're pretty atrocious to begin with, and in some situations there is nothing you can do that will be right. ( spoilers )
Perhaps not quite the pummeling experience I'd been led to expect - it's not Aronofsky - but as close as a big action film is ever likely to come to it. Great cast, too - Augustus Hill from Oz in the chopper, Stringer Bell running things, and the extremely good (and very gorgeous) Imogen Poots (whom obviously I checked was legal before publicly admitting to fancying her).

From 28 Weeks Later to 28 weeks late, or thereabouts - the final issue of Ultimates 2 finally arrived yesterday. Scriptwise, you know by now whether or not you like Ultimates, and this had the same mix of glossy ultraviolence, knowing and slightly cruel wit, and general dumbness. I like it. But the art! What has Bryan Hitch been doing for the last however many months? Half the time, these people simply weren't people-shaped. And if Hitch isn't about glossy, astounding but believable physicality, then what exactly is he for? He's heading dangerously close to early Image territory in parts of this.
Possibly even later, but arriving in the same blue moon shipment - All-Star Batman And Robin The Boy Wonder, which I increasingly feel would be awesome if only it came out on a sane schedule. Frank Miller's not trying to do the definitive version, like Morrison is in All-Star Superman. Why would be bother? Miller's already done the definitive Batman. Twice. He's doing an insane, turned-up-to-11 hyperpulp take on Batman, and that's fair enough, and good fun to boot. But you can't do trashy hyperpulp and take closer to a year than a month on each issue.
Meanwhile, in the field of comics which come out promptly but nobody ever seems to talk about anymore, Ultimate Spider-Man's new issue continues a recent tour-de-force of treachery, flawed heroism and the reality of what would happen when low-level superheroes trying to confront a corrupt businessman. Not that Miller didn't tell some great Daredevel vs Kingpin stories back in the day, but so far this looks to me a lot more like how it would actually play out.