Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Come, children, we have much to discuss.

It has been many weeks since I remembered to write some stuff up. Since then much has passed. Tedstock, for instance, now seems a fading memory. The Arcade Fire gig days before so bright and euphoric at the time, now a dim and transitory event, supplanted by more recent happenings which, if perhaps not on the same level, still demand as much attention from whatever judge whispers in my ear over such matters.

But what the hell, I’ll give it a shot. If you want to read about Ghost Rider it’s way, way, down the list.

Arcade Fire gig: February 2nd at Porchester Hall. Nikki and I arrived at Queensway station with a pretty poor knowledge of the area and, as usual, only some half-remembered google map searches for guidance. My impression of Queensway is that it’s a pretty terrible shithole where you probably wouldn’t want to be after it gets dark, however, dark it was, and there we were. A 10 minute walk towards the venue was partially foiled because of an ambiguous map, but having reached the area we expected the venue to be we asked a nearby stranger who informed us that while we were virtually on top of it now, we still had to walk around the corner to find it. Finding a gig venue for the first time is never easy and I have to make certain I complain about it every single time. I bet if you go back over the last few years of blogging you can find all kinds of whining on exactly that topic.

Insane Polish security guards and hap-hazard queueing aside, The Arcade Fire were excellent in every way. It was great to hear some of the new songs, which aren’t so new anymore as I just bought the album yesterday. In fact, on that topic, as I said earlier to my e-mail friends (rather than you rubbish blog friends) the music’s great but I don’t understand the inclusion of the flickbooks. The consensus is that it’s purely an exercise in gouging. I am a complete sucker who would buy a misshapen potato if they put the words “special edition” on it. The setlist for the gig was:

Black Mirror / Keep The Car Running / No Cars Go / Haiti / Black Wave/Bad Vibrations / My Body Is A Cage / The Well And The Lighthouse / Windowsill / Neighborhood # 3 (Power Out) / Rebellion (Lies) / Intervention / (Antichrist Television Blues) / Wake Up

Wake up was performed acoustically in the middle of the crowd. The whole thing was utterly mind blowing. We also have tickets to a Brixton gig in a week or so. I can’t imagine it’ll be as good as seeing them in a venue the size of Porchester Hall, but on the other hand, I’m confident it’ll still be excellent.

Tedstock, 3 days later, Bloomsbury Theatre. Last time Josh and I were at Bloomsbury theatre we were meeting Douglas Coupland. This time, an altogether different set of our favoured cultural icons took the stage. Stewart Lee compered this comedy benefit gig for one of his biggest influences, Ted Chippington, and in addition to reuniting Lee and Herring there was also a host of excellent people taking the stage. Alan Parker, Urban Warrior was great (”Ignorance is a weapon! USE IT!”) as were Simon Amstell and Phil Jupitus, the latter of whom read poems from his days as “Porky the Poet” in-between expressing incredulity about what he was able to get away with calling Comedy back in the 70s/80s. To be honest, I was slightly disappointed by Josie Long’s set having previously been looking forward to it after all the hype. It just underscores my previous belief that you shouldn’t expect anything to even happen, let alone be good, lest you invite disappointment. There’s plenty of Tedstock material here, anyway, should you wish to experience it for yourself: http://tedstock.podbean.com/ and there’s also an excellent review here: http://www.chortle.co.uk/shows/misc_live_shows/t/15059/tedstock/review/ - funniest moment of the night, for me, was when Lee and Herring took the stage and opened with the first few lines from Mitchell and Webb’s Mac Vs. PC adverts which had, at that point, been fucking everyone off for weeks, from Charlie Brooker ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2006031,00.html ) to, well, everyone else: ( http://www.noisetosignal.org/net/2007/01/uk-get-a-mac-ads.php ). You can’t write comedy like that.

At this point there’s a two-week gap where we saw Rush Hour get filmed and went to see Hot Fuzz, both epic tales documented in their own blog posts. So, in that case, I’ll skip straight to last Friday, when Nikki and I went to see Rory Bremner at Pinewood studios, in Teddington.

Teddington, as Cappsy and Seb warned us, appears to be located on the edge of the civilised world, about a billion miles out in Zone 6, as we discovered. To get there, we first went to Clapham Junction (a place I was last at when Paul and Relly lived there) and then onwards to Teddington on some kind of overground train machines. They’re like tube trains, only they’re outside a lot. We then faced a 10-15 minute walk in the rain to the studios. Teddington has literally nothing there. When you leave the station it’s just a vast wasteland. That, and a town full of shops no-one will visit. How does a High Street print shop stay open, in this day and age, in a town as small as Teddington? The economies of niche stores like that utterly baffle me. I assume they’re being run though their websites.

At Pinewood, as we queued we noticed both the studio for Quiz Call, and a huge trolley full of props marked “Harry Hill” - I considered using the matches I nicked from the pub earlier to end the horror of both things simultaneously, but my wish to see Bremner prevailed. Which, of course, was great. Unlike some TV programs we’ve seen recorded, there’s very little that gets left unseen from the recorded material, but from a purely “this is how TV is made” perspective it was great too, seeing the on-the-fly rewrites, the missed takes, and all that behind-the-scenes jazz. I’m not sure I’d go again, because what you see doesn’t differ massively from what makes it onto TV and it’s a real mission to get to, but as I’ve probably said before, any free recording is worth the money.

(Almost) lastly, this Saturday, Ian, Josh and I finally went to see the film that I’ve been waiting for since it’s originally announced date of February ‘06. Ghost Rider. I may well be the only Ghost Rider fan left, having begun a lifelong fandom of the character when I once picked up a Ghost Rider comic on the basis that Wolverine appeared in one panel and, at the time, I was a hardcore X-Men fanboy.

For weeks now I’ve been trying to convince everyone that Ghost Rider was going to be the most excellent film released this year, just because it amused me to say such things when they were blatant and total falsehoods. It was, to be fair, alright. I never expected it to be any good, what with the team they had to direct and act, but it was almost better than I expected. In fact, it’s actually pretty good up until the appearance of the Ghost Rider himself, at which point the plot goes a little south. GR’s dialogue is horrendous. Imagine a character who can only say things like “Time to die!” and “Let’s ride, scumbag!” and that’s more or less it. The villains are a group of 4 angsty emo-goths with vaguely elemental powers who are dispatched one at a time in hilariously short order. I admit, I’ll probably buy this on DVD - it’s no Hulk, that’s for sure.

Since I started writing this entry (foolishly using my mail client at work, meaning it’s a daytime-only gig) I’ve also been to see Charlotte Hatherley at the Islington Academy, on the 6th. This meant that I also had to learn the album, which had been released mere days before. I think I got okay mileage out of it. The gig was pretty decent. Nothing mind-blowing, but it was pretty cool to see her playing live in an arena where I could actually see her, rather than the last time, which was at a festival. It was damn loud, though, and she had like 15 guitarists or something, which drowned out the vocals a bit. The support band were quite decent too - a bunch of nutcases called Shuffle. Worth the tenner I paid, though I was completely fucked by the end of it. Earlier in the day, Rob alerted me to Kevin Smith’s forthcoming appearance, so got tickets for that, so that’s yet another gig to add onto the calendar. The next one is tomorrow’s Ash appearance at ULU. The fun never stops, clearly.