Disco Drizzle

I could have sworn that I saw Holly Johnson in the crowd for this. My mate Mark had some commitments abroad that meant he had to give away tickets for Hercules and Love Affair and very kindly punted them my way. Holly (if it were indeed he) was a in splendid shape, almost rotund, very sharply turned out in a rubbery black jacket and thick-soled low boots; a slicked back Offizer hairdo completed things nicely. I saw him again, drifting away from the stage about the time I left, and can only imagine what he was thinking: "Good God, I could swear me and some ropey Scousers in moustaches and iffy brickie drag were whipping up more of a libidinal frenzy with bad equipment in patchy L3 clubs in 1982. These people have all the computing power Apple can provide and a very forgiving and very naive audience of Shoreditch poseurs; all they end up sounding like is a high-end provincial gospel-house karaoke. Dance music glissandi cliches from 1987 rain from the skies."

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what Holly was thinking. Don't worry Mark, you didn't miss much, and it's a hell of a way from Reading to Hoxton.

Ruins and Nation

We saw the final instalment of the magical 'Robinson' sequence by Patrick Keillor, at the Rio in Dalston. There was a dreadful burden of excitement on my part, having been entranced and suffused with my own and multiple other histories during "London" and particularly "Robinson In Space". Keillor again tries to weave obliquely traumatic commentary on the entanglements of an itinerant, sexually complex researcher; this ticker-tape of news is now planted within a painfully slow, politically incontinent narrative of localised and architecturally located protest. The tear-jerking timing of the cuts from Vauxhall Park to the Thames, Reading town centre to Aldermaston, that propelled the gradual realisation in the first films that these are distracted, obsessional, admirable, lonely people making the film, are here in the third part sadly absent. Multiple longeurs of mould on signs, dusty flora, lose faith with the momentum needed to keep us caring about the reportage of these landscapes.