Highlights of the year thus far:
- Breaking Bad - discovered through work colleagues, the ongoing saga of a middle-aged chemistry teacher who discovers he has terminal cancer, and with nothing to lose sets up a crystal meth lab, proves to be consistently entertaining and amusing well into its second season, although I’m slightly concerned that the friends who recommended it were pretty insistent it was the ‘wrongest’ thing on television, bigging it up in my head as Chris Morris’s Oz or somesuch, and yet sitting there watching it, all I can think is how utterly reasonable it all seems.
- Not freezing to death during one of January’s many cold snaps. Fucking hell, it’s been cold in the flat though. I hand in my notice next week, which means I should be out of this shithole by mid-April, thank fuck.
- Catching up on As It Occurs To Me, which I completely failed to listen to in the run up to Christmas. Richard Herring as brilliantly puerile as ever. Why won’t people let him be on the telly? I also caught his Hitler Moustache show at the Leicester square theatre last week. I saw a pre-Edinburgh preview last year, which was pretty funny, but this was a much more refined, focused act, with lots of new material. He’s a very funny man.
- In a similarly late to the party vein, I also picked up the first issue of Dodgem Logic. The Moore stuff is predictably essential, Graham Lineham and Josie Long’s contributions are brief but brilliant, with everything else coming across as a bit meh… And yet, whilst there’s a vein of knee-jerk hippy bollocks there, something appeals about the just-throw-everything-at-the-page editorial direction. It’s the sort of thing I feel should be being done better somewhere on the internet, and yet for some reason isn’t. Interesting to see how it develops.
- Saw Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes. Not great, but nowhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be.
- My love of Grant Morrison’s ongoing Bat-saga is unconditional and unfailing, which I’m sure will come as a surprise to no one, so isn’t something I’ll go into here. His new creator-owned series Joe The Barbarian on the other hand, was an unknown quantity as I managed to completely miss all the hype and the interviews. I needn’t have worried of course - the first issue is a slowly paced scene-setter, but sets up the series concept beautifully, with incredibly lush artwork by the previously unknown to me Sean Murphy.
- Booking myself a trip to SXSW in Austin next month. Not that physically booking it was really much of a highlight, but something to look forward to. I used to joke about how I was boycotting America whilst George W. Bush was in power, but I’ve recently realised I did, in fact, boycott America whilst George W. Bush was in power.
I like the way I teased doing essay-length posts in my end of year round up, but have in fact made even less effort, resorting to bullet points rather than full posts. Something else I started doing this year was Project 365 - a photo a day for a year. Well, the loss of my camera lead, coupled with a few drunken nights where I forgot I was supposed to be taking a picture at some point meant I didn’t even make it through January (seems wholly appropriate the dream was born and died in a pub, mind. I only heard about it the day before NYE, chatting to a colleague in a pub, moments before he made off into the night with a stolen clay pot). Looks like my online fail is destined to continue. Thank you for your continued patience.
