Saturday 3rd of March, 2001
Spent the day alternately slouching and staggering around - getting up, breakfast and sitting were done on autopilot. A posting on the Corpses points me towards William Gibson's script for Alien 3. It's terrible - how someone can complain about the film that go made and recommend this instead eludes me. Non-existent characterisation, no "what-the-hell" factor than make the films so interesting. I'm inspired to search out Vincent Ward's script for the same project (the one with the monks on the wooden planet, quite similar to the one that got made). I think it's quite brilliant, possibly a minor entry in the logbook of Great Lost Movies.
A some point I decide that another night out will do me no good, and that I'll give Dave Russell a miss. Which is a shame, since he's one of the most entertaining acts around, and I promised. But I'm so knackered.
Time for another reassessment of my Pizza Strategy, as well as an opporunity to use some of those cheeses. Hurrah!
I turn the television on to watch TV itself for the first time since I came back from Italy. I want to watch the Progressive Rock Top Ten. No, actually, I don't want to watch it, but am drawn like a moth to a burning house. It turns out that it doesn't start until 10:00. Instead I find a Kirsty MacColl tribute, which is nice (apart from the fact that she had to be dead for it to be made), and I love 1986, which, like the other I Love... nostalgia programmes, bears no resemblance to the year I lived through.
I have to stay up to watch the Prog Top 10, I do. It is as I expected - taking the piss, basically. Bill Bailey playing sillybuggers doing the intros (although I'd predicted Rick Wakeman). Crimson at number nine. The music is specially chosen to be the widdliest, silliest sounding bits, for maximum risibility. They use footage from the Robert Fripp - Wimborne and New York documentary that I watched a couple of weeks ago with Laura (in fact the only other occasion that I turned on the TV since Italy), and, predictably, take the piss. It seems they never got the League of Gentlemen footage, or, if they did, didn't consider it worth including. A nice domestic clip of Fripp at home with Toyah, though. He is a fine, fine human being. Floyd at number one, deserved, but predictable. And none of this stuff is in any way informative, damn it. It does irritate me, the way they do this, because I do dearly love this stuff the way some people love Motown or Studio One records, and there's never been carte blanche to take the piss out of them. And everybody thinks they can have a go at prog.
Must ... have ... cocoa ... relax ....
Pfft.
A programme that a woman called Carol Morley has made about herself keeps me up. I don't know why, apart from the fact that (a) I increasingly suspect that she is the Godlike Paul Morley's sister, and (b) it's television, and thus just a hypnotic evil influence. There's a Tony Wilson presence, but not the GPM, who out to be on TV all the time by order of Government fiat.
Have to drag myself away from Spaced before it's far too late. It's already too late, and it can only get worse. When it becomes far too late, I'm lost.
Television is satanic. It steals time and, if you are not careful, your mind.
Oh yes.
Glad the majestic Ken Campbell is still getting the advert work, though.