Last week I read...
THE INDEPENDENT - AUGUST 2007

Marvel Comics Civil War Trade Paperbacks.
I have a huge backlog of these at the moment, which would have been unimaginable to me as a child. I vowed to give up reading new Marvel comics when this new Civil War storyline changed the continuity of the Marvel universe again. In this multi-issue, cross-title epic, Iron Man decides that all superheroes have to register their real ID's with Washington or get put in a Guantanamo-bay style camp which Iron Man's own company are paid by the government to make. It reminds me of 60’s Marvel comics, when there was real social commentary going on. It seems the only place American popular culture can discuss its current crisis is in comic books and science fiction.

Last week I watched ...
BBC News 24, almost continuously, as the floods engulfed my wife's home town of Gloucester and lapped at the fields surrounding my mother's Worcestershire village. We got a set-top box at Xmas and it's just more of the same shit as a rule, but without News 24 I'd now feel thoroughly disconnected. The best bit was when the RSPCA blokes crossed a flooded road with a dinghy full of rescued chickens, and were really downbeat and philosophical about it, in the way West Country folk are. I think there should be a film about them. It was great watching, minute by minute, as Gordon Brown tried to take control of the situation, and avoid making Bush-style flood errors.
When I'm in the States I go a bit mad if I can't get BBC News 24 or The Independent. Over there I feel like everyone is lying to me.

Last week I listened to...
The new, posthumous release by the free-jazz guitarist Derek Bailey, Standards. Everything has to stop when you hear it. Derek died at the end of 2005. I didn’t know him well but we corresponded and I ended up reading out a Chic Murray routine at his funeral, I think as a neutral UN observer in the world of Free Improvised Music. People look back nostalgically to the post-war jazz geniuses of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, all gone now, and never to be surpassed, but Derek showed there were still new discoveries to be made and you could see him in tiny clubs. Oh, and I went to see The Fall live for the 35th time. They exhumed Wings from 25 years ago and everyone went nuts. Other than that, business as usual, all newish material, no crowd-pleasers.

Last week I surfed...
The usual round of sites. Chortle.com, for all the comedy business news, Amazon to buy cds and books for work and pleasure, and The Fall website, to see what people thought of the London shows. The Internet is a terrible thing for the self-employed writer, a license to waste time, but sometimes all this time-wasting coalesces into a great idea.