| What kind of idiot tries to launch a coup on Snow Day? |
[Jan. 7th, 2010|11:00 am] |
| [ | Horses killed today: |
| |  indecisive | ] |
| [ | Donkey's dig: |
| | The Mountains Near Dellray - The Go-Betweens | ] |
So I've finally taken Foxbase Alpha out of the CD player - but only to swap in another St Etienne reissue and start reading London Belongs To Me. I vaguely recall hearing that it was the film rather than the book which inspired their song of the same name (see also 'Wuthering Heights'), but the book feels a lot like an old British film anyway, the sort of black&white minor classic BBC2 shows during the daytime. It has the same sort of narrator, wise but homely, timeless and omniscient but thoroughly rooted - "And what about Percy? After all, it was his morning as much as anybody's else. How is he getting on by now? Well, take a look in his bedroom and see for yourself."
It's also the exact sort of slice of life, state of the nation cross-section which I so despise in the modern middlebrow literary novel. And yet, somehow the distance makes that less of a problem (maybe now it's half-forgotten it has found its level). This even though being published in 1945 yet set in 1938-9 gives it the same pseudo-prescience about the war which I felt lessened Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square (and Hamilton is the closest other writer I know to Norman Collins, about whom I know nothing except that he wrote London Belongs To Me.
That's all pretty ambivalent, isn't it? And I'm not entirely sure why I'm still reading this, but I am, and fairly certain I'm going to read all 700 plus pages, and I think a lot of that is just down to that narratorial voice, and how well it suits London, and how if you can get London right I'll forgive an awful lot else.
(Timing may have helped too, in that it starts at Christmas. In December I kept reading things which I hadn't realised finished at Christmas - from Ian Hunter's Diary of a Rock'n'Roll Star to Batman: The Resurrection of R'as al Ghul and X-Men: Days Of Future Past. Now, another timely choice)
On the whole, it's been a gentle week so far - a milkshake under the Angel's wings, slow progresses through the ice and snow. I missed frolics in the snow yesterday because I assumed there'd be at least another day of it (slightly mistaken, but nevermind, eh?) and because I had a prior appointment for a Doctor Who binge. My route did take me through Clissold Park, though, and I can only assume that young people in Stoke Newington don't play enough violent computer games, because their aim with snowballs is dreadful. But, Doctor Who. In reverse order of merit:
Timelash: any arse who says that the new series isn't as good as the old should be forced to watch this, repeatedly, until they admit the error of their ways. Technobabble, crappy sets, an incoherent plot, risible monsters...Paul Darrow hamming it up is about the only thing which salvages matters, because Colin Baker is trying his best but there's really not much to work with. DVD also features a Making Of in which all the survivors blame the producer and director, who are safely dead, which is cowardly but fun.
The Sontaran Experiment: Tom Baker, Sarah Jane (in a less stylish wardrobe than she now boasts) and hopeless buffoon Harry Sullivan fall down holes and are pursued by a camp robot for two episodes. It was originally meant to be six. Dear heavens. The Sontarans here are not so much a warrior race as galactic bureaucrats (they can't invade without a proper risk assessment). They're not as short as nowadays, but the faces are even sillier.
An Unearthly Child: the unaired pilot version of the very first episode. This is where it all began and the focus on the human characters is closer to the new series than a lot of what came in between. Parts of it still send shivers up the spine, and not just from nostalgia.
City of Death: Tom Baker and Mrs Richard Dawkins charge around Paris at the show's peak, even if the plot by Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth, doesn't make a lick of sense. The DVD also has a fly-on-the-wall documentary following Sardoth, second-to-last of the Jagaroth, as he tries to make a life for himself in the British countryside ("EU rules oblige the government to give Sardoth an enormous house"). It's funny, but not quite as funny as Douglas Adams' script for the episode proper.
Brilliant if too-short interview with Andy Serkis. Apparently method posture for his portrayal of Ian Dury has left him with a "massive weird muscle" in his groin, and Ian's widow and son both responded to early drafts with "He's so much darker, so much more of a cvnt than this". For all that rock biopics tend to disappoint me (so samey), I may make an exception here. |
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| You're the most wonderful man and I don't want you to die |
[Jan. 1st, 2010|08:16 pm] |
| [ | Horses killed today: |
| |  emotionally exhausted | ] |
| [ | Donkey's dig: |
| | Song For Ten - Murray Gold & Neil Hannon | ] |
Happy new decade, all, and it will no doubt surprise few of you to find me beginning with a Doctor Who review.
I'd expected some OTT RTD balls-out insanity like the end of the last full series, so that mostly rather quiet and contemplative little story (with a brief interlude of sh1t blowing up) rather took me by surprise. ( spoilers )
And yet somehow, in spite of having spent most of the second half in tears and still being slightly sniffly now, I don't feel...what's the word I want? Sated, more than satisfied. I suppose with so much changing, it couldn't have felt too much like an ending, lest a generation that has only known Davies and Tennant not come back for Moffat and Smith.
Coincidentally, the last Who audio I listened to was also about Time Lord mindworks dirty tricks - Unregenerate!. The best I'd heard in a while, helped by being eerie - a mood which audio does very well. I heard an audio book, as opposed to play, for the first time recently, Stephen King's Arthur Machen homage 'N', and even though the peculiarities of the form threw me off a little (do you really need to read out the explanation 'he paused' when the speaker can simply pause?), that was devilishly effective too. An ingeniously sadistic story, in which one obsessive-compulsive's tics really do prevent the destruction of the world. Even if the CDs take more than two hours to read 80 pages of story, I think it worked better this way, particularly as an accompaniment to the fairly OCD task of ironing. I certainly don't see how the forthcoming comics adaptation will capture the effect, not even with Alex Maleev on art.
This is probably as good a place as any to talk about Tennant's Hamlet too, isn't it? Which from a ratings point of view probably couldn't have done better than airing between the two parts of his final outing as the Doctor; it's just that I find that sort of crossed streams effect slightly trying (same as, for instance, I can't read anything else by George RR Martin until he either finishes or abandons A Song of Ice and Fire, to which I am already committed. Same as I can't read a Who book between parts of one TV story). Too often I found myself thinking, ah yes, that's one of his Doctorisms there. "What a piece of work is a man" is pretty much the "You humans!" stuff, isn't it? And so forth. Sometimes to the benefit of the play - the "readiness is all" speech works even better overlaid with the knowledge that not just Hamlet but the Doctor is headed for his end. This on top of the difficulty I already have with just watching a play which, between A-Level and Cambridge, I've probably analysed more and deeper and longer than any other work. I see the strings - and that's not a bad thing, because they make one of the most wonderfully intricate cat's cradles a human mind ever constructed. But it does leave me a long way from getting caught up in the surface narrative. In some ways that's for the best, because under the surface all the stuff that looks like flaws, isn't (and without the whole project coming off the wheels like the similarly deliberate but far less satisfactory Measure for Measure); that the play within the play is an idiotic way to prove the Ghost's credentials is a flaw in Hamlet, but a masterstroke in Hamlet.
So was it any good? I don't know. I can't know. I'm too close to the play and the perform(er/ance) to know whether they matched up. But I know it wasn't an embarrassment. I also know that Christopher Eccleston, so desperate to avoid typecasting that he bailed on Who after one series, has never got closer than the Tarantino-style OTT remake that is The Revenger's Tragedy, and that before he was the Doctor. So good on you, Tennant, and good luck with the rest of your career. You were marvellous. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 30th, 2009|12:29 pm] |
So here I sit in the library on a dismal day at the fag-end of a decade on which nobody quite seems able to put their finger, but a decade at the start of which I wouldn't have been sat writing anything like this, having been strictly a messageboards and emails boy. The post-christmas milestones have been passed; thank you to all who made my birthday, and I remain amazed that the Freaky Trigger pub crawl could find an OK and a great pub within minutes of where I worked for eight years but neither of which I had ever entered (and about how many viable post-apocalyptic Ant&Dec TV formats there are, but over that topic it is probably best to draw a veil). Which means now it's just about waiting out the last 36 hours. Back home, my CD player currently contains one of the first great albums of the previous decade, St Etienne's Foxbase Alpha (albeit in that most noughties of formats, the 2CD deluxe reissue) and a burned copy (the second most noughties format) of what may be one of the next decade's first great albums, the new one from Los Campesinos!. I have no idea what I'm saying here, I just felt the moment should be marked, even if it's not much of a moment. |
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| The Middle Of The End Of Time |
[Dec. 25th, 2009|11:54 pm] |
| [ | Horses killed today: |
| |  halfway through Balls of Fury | ] |
| [ | Donkey's dig: |
| | It Doesn't Often Snow At Christmas (New Version) - Pet Shop Boys | ] |
The reason I didn't get straight online to share my thoughts with the interweb...well, yes, I was also busy on some hard-fought games of Othello with the parents, but beyond that, I simply don't know what to make of it. The first time since the comeback we've had a named Part One and Part Two on TV, and fair enough because it's just too soon to say. I could have done without the Matrix bits, I guessed what "they are coming back" meant as soon as I heard it on the trailers, but the key Being John Simm stuff - I don't know yet whether that was good or not. I have invites for NYD which I may decline simply because I cannot wait one second longer than I need to before finding out where this all goes. Curse you, RTD, you glorious bastard.
In other news, I've finally caught up with Alan Moore's new 'underground' paper Dodgem Logic and...well, the articles by Moore, Graham Linehan and Josie Long are pretty entertaining, as you'd expect, if not any of their best work. The contributors you've not heard of mainly make clear why you've not heard of them; there's a lot of the sort of kneejerk hippy claptrap which eventually saw me lose patience with The Idler, the worst being the Lejome Pindling screed which rehearses the tired old complaints about 'manufactured pop'. Pindling loftily pronounces that Lady Gaga's "lyrical content is trash at best"; I suppose at least that quote is literate (if inane), which is more than can be said for most of his piece. Later he declares "The majority of albums I listen to nowadays have 2 tracks which I would consider good and a further 12 which I would say are questionable", unaware that he is himself one of those filler tracks. In between is the local content, one piece again by Moore, which I almost compared to a Northampton version of the less good bits of the capital's delightful Smoke before realising how unfair that would be. All Moore's previous Northampton work - and presumably his novel-in-progress, Jerusalem, have found the same wonder and strangeness in the town which most other psychogeographers can so much more easily pick up in London. Here, he and his collaborators are just taking the simple route and showing provincial Britain as a denatured, grotty dump. I'll give it another issue or two to settle in, clearly, but I really expect more from Moore.
And is it just me (and my family, in rare consensus) or would Wall-E have been a better film if it were half an hour shorter? |
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