Eclectica

Mostly cogent, most of the time.

Highlander! Books! Nonsense!

My recent quietude is mostly due to:

1) exhaustion – the bronchitis got really serious and I ended up a total wreck; better now

2) work – oddly, now that my job is social media (I currently run www.dcms.gov.uk, and since that’s a completely new site since the election you can imagine how busy I’ve been) I find myself having opted out of it almost entirely in my personal life; only temporarily, I’m sure

3) I’ve, perhaps stupidly, dived into a writing project that needs to be finished in the next six weeks and is a hell of a lot of work

The writing thingy is unlike anything I’ve written so far and requires shedloads of historical research. So I’m breaking the habit of a lifetime and scribbling in the margins of lovely new hardback books with my little black pen as I commute each day.

Afterblight

Must confess to a modicum of surprise that Children’s Crusade has not yet garnered a single review. It seems to have sunk pretty much without trace. Heigh ho. If anyone wanted to review it on Amazon, I wouldn’t cry salt tears…

I did, however, do another interview with Jared at pornokitsch on its release. Read my witterings.

Highlander

In other business, the Highlander plays I wrote for Big Finish have now been mostly recorded and are coming out as a box set in January next year. You can pre-order them now for a reduced price of £25 – bargain!

(Warning: may include traces of James Moran or have been produced in a studio where James Moran was present.)

Books

In the last few weeks I read Crocodile Tears, the new Alex Rider from Anthony Horowitz. Predictably, I loved it to bits.

I also worked my way through Kim Stanley Robinson’s dense, quasi-mystical sci-fi rock opera The Memory of Whiteness, which made my head feel funny. It didn’t quite work as well for me as the Orange Coast books, or the Mars trilogy, but it was chock full of great concepts and well drawn characters.

Music

I’ve been listening to Amanda Palmer and Jason Webly’s wacky concept album Evelyn Evelyn. Ostensibly a series of songs by conjoined twins, it features hilarious parodies of musical styles, from folk revival to eighties synth rock via twenties jollity. Dark, funny and brilliant.

I also enjoyed Ryan Adams’ sci-fi metal concept album Orion. Available only as limited edition vinyl from his new self-run record company Pax America, it was a lovely package, with poster, stickers, free single and download code. It serves as something of a dry run for the fully fledged new albums and archive material he’s planning to release soon, and as such it’s a hugely impressive and deeply strokable thing to have. Plus, to my slight surprise, I kind of love the four chord screaming madness of it all – who can’t love an album with a song on it called ‘Gorgon, Master of War!’?

But the cream of the recent crop is Bang Goes the Knighthood from The Divine Comedy. I’m a long time fan but will, if pressed, admit that Neil Hannon can be a bit hit and miss and occasionally too arch for his own good. But this is easily his strongest, most consistent collection of songs to date with only one that doesn’t do it for me (Island Life, since you ask).

Telly

Wifey’s fave new thingy is Castle, an old school detective show with the always watchable Captain Tightpants in it (he once called me a stalker, and contributed hand claps to the Counting Crows single Hanginaround, fact fans!)

I think what I like most about it is that for a show with such a strong male lead, the writers have surrounded him with women, all of whom he gets on with great – he’s a single dad to a teenage daughter; his bonkers mother, who raised him alone, lives with them; and he has a female detective partner; hell, he even gets on well with his ex-wife! And at no point does he come off as threatened or bothered by all these confident, wonderful women in his life, or rely on a male best bud for validation, neither is he portrayed as in any way explicitly or implicitly immasculated by this – the conceit of the character is that everyone thinks he’s a man’s man but secretly he’s most comfortable around women, although he’s completely straight. It’s a subtle but quietly groundbreaking character portrayal and Fillion sells it brilliantly.

Also, it freely throws in gags about Anais Nin and The Scarlet Letter without explaining them, just expecting you get the references. Smart.

It’s a solid hit Stateside and just got picked up for a third season, deservedly so – Fillion really merits a vehicle like this and after the disapointment of Firefly (it still hurts so much!) and the disastrous treatment of Drive, it’s great he finally got a hit.

That’s enough for now. And look at me, I didn’t even rant about the finale of Lost, or rave about Doctor Who. Such discipline!

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