Unbe-bloody-lievable. Someone stole Ian Curtis’s gravestone. I’m now glad I got there before this all happened. How low will some people stoop?? Sheesh.

This was meant to have been uploaded much earlier in the week (therefore apologies if you’ve already seen it), but Wordpress and Youtube are not friends (and, by extension, Wordpress and I are not friends either) so it’s been frustrating trying to get it to work. Alas, I still can’t and have now given up so hit the link for dose of the Crazy English to brighten up your Friday morning.

People of New York, the annual NY Comic Con has invaded your city…

My original plans for a NY trip around this time were scuppered by a job offer I couldn’t refuse, so I’ll just have to live vicariously through you all and urge you to get down to the Jacob Javits Center and check it out. Lots of special guests (Stan Lee! Grant Morrison! Neil Gaiman! Scott McCloud! and Selma Blair, if none of those guys sold it for you!), panels and workshops, costumes and comic book geeks. What more could you want of a weekend in New York, right?…

While my contributor bio for this site clearly states “not-so-secret nerd”, up till now I’ve managed to keep my Popserious posts relatively nerd-free. However, having been given free rein (of sorts) to start posting about comics and things, let’s call this the start of the downward slide… I’ll ease you into it, never fear.

If you read Faran’s Lit Snit post the other day, you may have seen my impassioned defence of The Princess Bride (book) in the comments section: “I am a big screaming fangirl, forcing copies onto all my friends, kind of person when it comes to the book”. It’s true, I am and I do. There are certain books that I get like this about, that I am so gleefully passionate about that I just want everyone to read – with the main offenders being The Princess Bride, His Dark Materials Trilogy, The Moviegoer, and the Scott Pilgrim series, starting with volume 1, Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life. And here’s where I go all screaming fangirl again.

Scott Pilgrim rules. He has an awesome life. As the title suggests, there’s “precious little” to it: he hangs out, he plays bass in his band Sex Bob-omb, he dates high schooler Knives Chau, he hangs out some more. He’s between jobs. So far, so typical slacker type story. Then mysterious Amazon.ca delivery girl Ramona Flowers [“Doesn’t she have the most ridiculous name?” “I know, it’s so Ramona Quimby, Age 8. And yet… Flowers.”] rollerblades into his life, with her ever-changing hairstyles and seven evil ex-boyfriends, and everything changes: slacker becomes Super Mario with kung-fu moves.

There’s little to fault here. The tone, the dialogue, the humour (some genuine LOL moments), the manga-style artwork (I’m not a manga reader; don’t let the style put you off), the music references – it feels like these could be your friends, people you know.

Created by Canadian mastermind, Bryan Lee O’Malley, the film rights have been optioned by Universal: Edgar Wright (Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz. Totally awesome) will direct, and Michael Cera (Arrested Development, Superbad, Juno) has been confirmed to play Scott. Now, I love Michael Cera. He’s definitely on my Inappropriate and/or Underage Crushes List™ (he falls into the latter category). I’m just not quite sold on him as Scott Pilgrim yet. But if George Michael can become a bit more chilled out, badass and confident, I am willing and more than happy to be proved wrong.

After borrowing volumes 1 [SP’s Precious Little Life] and 2 [Scott Pilgrim Versus The World] from my local library, reading them both in one sitting (frequently laughing out loud), I ran straight out and bought my own copies, plus volume 3 [Scott Pilgrim & The Infinite Sadness]. Then bought copies for people I thought would like it/should read it. Then waited impatiently for volume 4 [Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together] (even more impatiently when half the comic stores in London sold out the day it was released. Some kind soul took pity on the lack of stock in the Smoke and sent me a copy for Christmas in the end).

I more than encourage you to track these books down – library, store (aim for the smaller comic book retailers, eh? Support your local indie store! NY has some great comic shops), borrow a friend’s – just read it. As the tag on the back of bo

ok one says: “You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. This is Scott Pilgrim. This is your life.”

Images copyright Bryan Lee O’Malley & Oni Press.

[from last summer’s sketchbook]

Rewind to Autumn Fall 2005. It’s Sunday night; I rock up to apartment 3a to hang out and pick up a camera from Sarah (part of a photographic project that was being done for a magazine - that went bust about two days after I submitted everything to them. Annoying much?). I walk into what was then the living room to find myself staring at a huge rasterised poster on one wall. It’s a striking - and familiar - image, and at some point during the evening it becomes clear that it’s Joy Division (if there’s one thing I got from New York, it was a musical education; my knowledge was pretty limited before I moved there). Later on, I look up JD, listen to them, realise I actually know a bunch of their songs - just never realised who they were by. I listen again. And again. And slowly Joy Division become one of my favourite, most-listened to bands.

Fast forward to - well, now. The lyrics I’ve used to title this post couldn’t feel more apt: London is grinding me down, the seemingly neverending job hunt is so depressing and dispiriting, the temp job I’m at is doing my head in. It’s time for an escape.

Friday we drive up North, via the old Alma Mater for a brief pit stop (quite odd going back there), then across to the Peak District, where I’m visiting my oldest friend who now lives in Buxton. As we’re eating dinner, she asks if there’s anything in particular I’d like to do that weekend. Well, I say, now you mention it…

Saturday comes and the driving rain of the night before has disappeared, though the wind tries to rip the car door off its hinges as I open it. We drive across the Peaks to the next big town over, Macclesfield, hometown of Ian Curtis, Joy Division’s tortured lead singer, who committed suicide at the age of 23, in 1980.

As we drive through the cemetery gates, a part of me feels a bit odd about this. I’d talked to my friend Dan about the possibility of visiting the grave before I came, my doubts about it - but as he said, What else are pilgrimages? We park and look at the map of the graveyard as I’d read that Curtis’s stone was the only one actually mentioned on the map. It isn’t. His is a small kerbstone marker… one among very many. We walk around the cemetery for about half an hour - and of course it ends up being ten feet from where we’d parked (if only we’d circled the cemetery anti-clockwise..!)

[bigger]

I stand in front of it, not sure what to do or how to feel. Others have left small trinkets - some daffodils, a plastic windmill, even a box of cigarettes and a lighter. There’s a tupperware tub there as well, which I’d read about on a memorial website; the author had opened it out of curiosity to find birthday cards to Ian, with the top one being from his mother. I don’t touch it, it feels like it would be too intrusive. My kind friend, the non-Joy Division person, is starting to get cold and doesn’t quite understand why I wanted to come here in the first place - and to be honest, I’m not sure I can even explain it myself.

There’s a strange feeling, caught somewhere between my stomach and throat, as I stand there. That someone with that much potential has become a small stone marker, bedecked with plastic toys. We turn and head back to the car, and on the drive home I plug my ipod into her car stereo and play Joy Division to her (”Oh I know these songs”, she says) and the feeling won’t quite fade, but as the music fills the car and we drive through the old mining town and landscapes that formed the music, it morphs slowly into a sad kind of happiness and I realise that my friend Dan was right, that this was a pilgrimage of sorts, and that they don’t always have to be religious. Sometimes they’re just about a brilliant band that affects your life.

But it may be anticipated on the interweb.

“There’s something implacable, earnest, and righteously angry in the air. And it raises all kinds of questions for burned-out Boomers and jaded Gen Xers who’ve been ground down to the stump by the mostly losing battles of the past 30 years. Can it be — at long last — that Americans have, simply, had enough? Are we, finally, stepping out to take back our government — and with it, control of our own future? Is this simply a shifting political season — the kind we get every 20 to 30 years — or is there something deeper going on here? Do we dare to raise our hopes that this time, we’re going to finally win a few? Just how ready is this country for big, serious, forward-looking change? …

Between our corporate-owned Congress and the spectacularly bad judgment of Bush’s executive branch, there’s never been a government in American history more inept, corrupt, and criminally negligent than this one — or more shockingly out of touch with what the average American is going through. Just ask anyone from New Orleans — or anyone who has a relative in the military…”

So. Monday. Popserious post day. As I sit here, trying to think of something witty and/or interesting to write about, the whole left side of my face is throbbing and I can’t quite focus through the constant ache of the inflamed (and possibly infected) wisdom tooth gum area. Ouch. With bells on. I now understand why my 16-month-old godson is so ratty and whiny when he’s teething.

So instead of relating some Londonesque anecdote or something - perhaps, say, telling you about how my friend and I walked the Thames path east from Tower Bridge and randomly ended up down at Surrey Docks City Farm on Saturday (including walking past Mayflower Wharf, from whence the Mayflower set off on its course to populate your fair land with pilgrims), that it was sunny but freezing and I got badly windchapped cheeks,

and it reminded me of the Saturday two years ago that another friend and I decided to walk up to Central Park Zoo but spent most of our time in the tropical house because it was so fricking cold out (lesson to be learnt from this: February just isn’t warm enough to spend a day walking round outside), I’m just going to wish you all a happy Monday.

And then I’m going to rinse my mouth with warm salt water, as advised by my dentist, take more co-codamol, make a cuppa and watch Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Or perhaps more Buffy. I haven’t yet decided.

As you may have heard, Camden Market got hit by a fire this weekend, gutting half the stalls and a pub (which, as every news report I seem to have read likes to mention, is frequented by the likes of Winehouse and Doherty and co.) While my memories of Camden tend to revolve more around The Good Mixer and the Dublin Castle, I always had a soft spot for the market (thought Saturdays could be a bit of an overcrowded nightmare). Spare a thought for the poor stall-owners who aren’t insured and just lost most of their stock.

“And now for the weather: it seemed like Spring hit the UK early this weekend, as temps soared to 17 C (62.2 F apparently) on Saturday”…

So here’s the thing about the British: at the first rays of warm sunshine, they strip off and act as if it’s summer. No matter that it’s actually Feb. 9th. The stereotypes about English weather came about for a reason. Last summer was dismal: it seemed to rain almost every day and there was wide-scale flooding. So when it seems like spring has arrived, albeit somewhat prematurely, the public grabs the sunshine while they can. There were pictures of people in Metro this morning lying on the beach; we spent the weekend walking round in t-shirts and eating al fresco (yet scraping ice off the cars in the morning), and seeing others do the same. The sun comes out and it’s all t-shirts, shorts, flip-flops… pneumonia be damned! We decided to escape London for a few hours and drove down to Windsor to see the castle. It was very pretty. I think I could live in a castle. Although my sister waved at the windows hopefully, calling hello to Wills and Kate, there was no response, so we admired the gargoyles and statue of Queen Victoria, couldn’t locate a cheap-enough riverside pub so enjoyed some beverages from the oh-so-English and royal Ye Olde Starbuckes, then headed back to the Smoke before our lungs started missing the pollution.

London is completely arctic at the moment, though sunny during the day. Some poor trees, totally confused by the global warmed weather, have started blossoming - like the cherry blossom in the square where I’m working at the moment (above). I spend my days at this rubbish temp job doodling in my notebook (it feels like school again!) and planning a new comic, and occasionally offering to photocopy large stacks of pages so I can space out at the copier and mentally count down the minutes and hours before I can bust out of there.

The evening tube rides home are full of idiotic commuters and tourists who don’t think through that perhaps taking a suitcase half as big as yourself on the tube to Heathrow at peak rush hour times might not be the best idea. At Holborn station one evening there’s a Pearly King sitting on the bench, a throw-back to a very different London. I read the Metro over people’s shoulders and tap my toes whilst listening to my ipod. Two small boys are fighting over their mum’s cell phone. A foreign couple jump off the train, frantically gathering up bags with London Gatwick airport tags on them, clearly realising they’re on the wrong tube. Eventually we’re at my stop and I hustle up the steps to get out the station, buttoning my coat up as much as it will go against the unwelcome cold, eager to get home to warmth and a cup of tea - it’s not just a national stereotype…

A UK band for your listening pleasure, to get you through these slow, cold February days: Slow Club.

[PS. Happy belated birthday, Sarah!]

So this week I’m stuck at this reallllllly shitty temp job, that I won’t go into for fear of boring you (and making myself cry). The offices are based in Holborn, about four minutes’ walk from the British Museum (and therefore four and half minutes - dangerously close - to my second favourite comic book store in London, Gosh Comics). Lunch break finally rolls around and I bust out of the stifling office atmosphere and head out for a walk, ending up in front of the museum, being one of the only interesting places around those parts. Nearly all the big museums and galleries in London are free (donations welcome), so I navigate through all the school groups on field trips, and tourists posing for photos, and wander through the main atrium and find myself in front of the Rosetta Stone.

I’d like to say I stood in front of it, thinking heavy intellectual thoughts about the origins of language and how whoever carved the inscriptions did such a delicate job… but in fact there were too many tourists around so I patted myself on the back for my attempt at being cultural and slunk back out for a cultural trip of a different sort… a little more Hellboy and Spiderman than Ancient Egyptians…