Spank The Monkey

Simian Substitute Site For July 2012: Funny Monkey Comedy Carnival

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR JUNE 2012

Comedy: RHLSTP! (rhlstp!) Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast came to the end of its run this month, and I think it can be considered a roaring success. But don't take my word for it: the live recordings that took place at the Leicester Square Theatre throughout May and June are all available for free download or streaming at that link up there. They've all got their highlights. The one featuring Stewart Lee (listen out for myself and The BBG chuckling in row B) is a delightful reunion of Lee and Herring, and sounds exactly like what it is: two old mates having one of a series of irregular catch-up sessions. But the biggest bellylaughs can probably be found in the Charlie Brooker episode, which slowly mutates into the two men trying to see which one can come up with the most unspeakable idea to say on stage. (It's approximately a draw at the end, from what I can remember.) The Edinburgh variant of the podcast returns in August, with the promise of more London shows (with, let's be honest, more famous guests than the Scottish version) in the autumn.

Movies: Plenty of London film festivals are on the horizon, long before we need to think about the London Film Festival. (With new boss Clare Stewart looking to make her mark on her first LFF, her decision to reduce its length by four days is a tad disturbing. But we'll wait and see.) In the meantime, two festivals announced their programmes in June, meaning you've still got time to go along to them if you can. HK15 Film Festival is an event from the lovely people at Terracotta, intended as a celebration of Hong Kong cinema fifteen years after the handover back to Chinese rule. It's a fine mixture of new movies and stone-cold classics: the most intriguing prospect is that of Jimmy Wang Yu doing a Q&A after a screening of the legendary One-Armed Swordsman. Meanwhile, FrightFest continues to do what it always did, although this year's selection of horror movies seems to veer between the extremes of the gruellingly realistic and the spectacularly daft. (Main examples of the latter include Cockneys vs Zombies and Dead Sushi.) In other film festival news, Scala Beyond doesn't announce its programme for another couple of weeks, but the idea behind it sounds fascinating...

Theatre: I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Joe Orton's What The Butler Saw is the finest play in the English language, and that's the end of it. The current London production (running at the Vaudeville Theatre until August 25th) can't quite live up to the first time I saw it: at the National Theatre in the mid-90s, when the cast included a young and unknown David Tennant, and his genitals. (Full proof here. Not safe for work, obviously, and may come with some even-less-safe-for-work advertising attached.) I think that first viewing had the element of surprise on its side: nowadays, I'm already deeply familiar with the precision of Orton's plotting and his hit rate of one zinger every other line, so it's down to how well the cast can deliver the goods. Early reports accused this particular bunch of actors of overplaying the material, but since the press night they seem to have settled down a bit, and overact it just to the right degree. (Lines like 'my uterine contractions have been bogus for some time' don't really call for subtlety.) The iffy reviews have knocked down audience confidence to the extent that big discounts are widely available on stalls seats, so grab a bargain while you can.

Simian Substitute Site For June 2012: Apeman Spa

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR MAY 2012

Movies: Since I reviewed Whit Stillman's delightful Damsels In Distress at last year's LFF, it's undergone a bit of re-editing. The new version - reported to contain fewer references to Cathar love - came out in the UK at the end of April, and has probably reached the end of its theatrical life by now. But thanks to an ICA Sunday afternoon double bill, and a tatty old VHS that I recorded off Sky Movies back in the day when I was willing to pay for it, we recently spent a day rewatching all of Stillman's pre-Damsels features. (If I'd known at the time that he also directed an episode of Homicide back in the mid-90s, we'd have watched that too.) It's fascinating to follow the path from Metropolitan through Barcelona to The Last Days Of Disco: the ironic wit of his dialogue has always been sharp as a tack, but his characterisation and technical skill have come on by leaps and bounds from film to film. (In particular, the sound quality of Metropolitan was atrocious in the ICA's print, which is a problem for a film which has very little other than dialogue going for it.) Two main delights resulted from watching these films in bulk - firstly, the realisation that Disco takes place in a Stillmanverse that includes characters from the first two films: secondly, that he's always been a sucker for a goofy dance scene. (Although in Metropolitan, all the dancing happens offscreen.)

Theatre: Isango Ensemble are back in London, and are currently a few days away from the end of their season at the Hackney Empire. On stage and on film, they've specialised in putting a unique South African spin on classic stories with music and performance. Their 2008 version of The Magic Flute was a huge hit, and I was hoping that their adaptation of La Boheme (one of three pieces in this rep season) would work along the same lines. Unfortunately, it doesn't, and it has to be said that part of the reason why is that La Boheme simply isn't as good an opera as The Magic Flute. Mozart's tunes are bulletproof, and hearing them rearranged for marimbas and African choir allows you to enjoy them in a whole new light. Puccini's melodies don't quite survive the treatment, despite strong performances from the cast in general and company leader Pauline Malefane in particular. Though as one of our party pointed out, Malefane's possibly a little too well-upholstered to be playing a consumptive. (Oh, sorry, that might be a spoiler for some people.)

Travel: If you've been following me on Twitter for the last couple of weeks - go on, do it, it's fun - then you'll know that The Belated Birthday Girl and I are in the middle of one of our regular trips to Japan. (This bit's actually being written on the back seat of an Okinawa bus.) You'll be hearing all about our travels in detail throughout June, don't worry about that. However, it does mean that I don't have much else I can report on for May in this page, as I'm saving it all up for the travel articles. Have a funny picture instead courtesy of Twitter's own @PastryThief, who was hoping this could be the Simian Substitute Site for June. And it nearly was, until we spotted something while travelling in Naha...

Simian Substitute Site For May 2012: Go Ape

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR APRIL 2012

Books: I've written about my love of The Pogues before, and my disappointment at how they've gradually (and literally) pissed their legacy away with a series of increasingly shambolic reunion gigs. But for a period in the mid-to-late-80s, they were unstoppable. Their lead singer told his side of the story in his 2001 book A Drink With Shane MacGowan, although the interview format and the author's short attention span made it more interesting as a laboratory experiment than a memoir. Now it's the turn of accordionist James Fearnley to have a go at documenting the band's history, and Here Comes Everybody makes a much better job of it. Fearnley freely admits in a note at the end that the book is "a work of creative non-fiction," in which he's recreated conversations and events to show the way he remembered them happening, rather than perhaps the way they really happened. It makes for a fascinating read: full of anecdotes and humour, but brilliantly depicting the exhilaration and frustration of the band's parabolic relationship with success. MacGowan may not have written a song worth a damn for 15 years now, but his cover quote is one for the ages: "it's just how I'd imagine I'd remember it."

Comedy: I only really discovered The Bugle Podcast last summer, when its protagonists Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver stormed a late night Edinburgh comedy show and made highlights of it available for audio download. I liked the idea of a weekly podcast featuring two guys attacking the news with a satirical sledgehammer: I was less comfortable with the podcast being hosted by The Times, and having to battle through their website and paywall in order to get at it. Well, since last summer, things have changed: Zaltzman and Oliver bit the hand that fed them once too often, The Times sent them packing, and the podcast is now a completely independent affair run through Soundcloud. The latest edition, Bugle 192, shows them enjoying the freedom to give Rupert Murdoch a good kicking while he's down. My one irritation with the whole thing is that I've also just discovered the weekly Radio 5 show 7 Day Sunday, which often features Zaltzman as a guest, cheerfully recycling topical jokes he's already used on The Bugle a couple of days earlier.

Travel: The other big discovery I made in Edinburgh last year was the deliciousness of BrewDog beer. The Belated Birthday Girl agreed with me, and for Christmas she bought me a small parcel of BrewDog shares as part of their Equity For Punks offering. As shareholders, we were therefore entitled to attend the company's Annual General Meeting, held at the end of April in Aberdeen. It was a unique combination of corporate presentation, gig and piss-up, plus a brief coach outing to the building site that will eventually become their new brewery. Plenty of beer on sale at reasonable prices (£2 bought you a pint of their lower end beers, or a half of their braincell killers), plus free tastings of some of their newer products, including a spectacular 15.1% Imperial Stout called Dog A. The bands weren't bad either, with The Little Kicks and Bombskare providing the highlights. I took lots of photos while drunk: these are the ones that were in focus.

Simian Substitute Site For April 2012: Easter Monkeys

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR MARCH 2012

Comedy: Mopping up some much-delayed business from last summer's Edinburgh Fringe, I've finally caught up with Richard Herring's newest show What Is Love, Anyway? The show's programme - the usual lavish affair, available for free with a recommended donation to Scope - confirms how long WILA? has been doing the rounds, containing as it does references to the days when Herring and Andrew Collins hadn't fallen out. Similarly, it's hard for Herring to sound convincing on the negative aspects of love when he knows that we know that the story he tells in the second half of meeting his new long-term girlfriend is fast approaching its punchline: they're getting married over the Easter weekend. But as ever, he's an engaging storyteller, and admits this one is closer to the gentler autobiographical mode of The Headmaster's Son than anything else he's done. Having said that, Herring's unscripted shows are where he really takes off nowadays, so we can look forward in May to what the cool kids will doubtless be calling RHLSTP. (Rerlstup!)

Music: The first time I saw Joe Gideon And The Shark, they were supporting Nick Cave in the Art Deco splendour of the Troxy. The second time, they were headlining at the more intimate Borderline. Last week was the third time, and their gear took up the entire back wall of the tiny little basement at Power Lunches in Dalston, making them the only live act I've ever seen playing progressively smaller venues each time. To be fair, the most recent one was a slightly experimental affair, with the brother and sister duo trying out a batch of new songs from their forthcoming second album. They're all sounding great: as before, Joe tells stories over guitar riffs, while Viva performs choreographed miracles with drums, keyboards and a loop box all at the same time, but the new material adds a healthy dollop of visceral noise on top of the tunes. That may just be a consequence of the live setting, of course: hopefully we'll find out when the new record's released.

Video: One event I forgot to tell you about from last month: the one-off screenings of the Chemical Brothers' live movie, Don't Think, which took place roughly simultaneously in cinemas across the world. It's an admirable attempt to convey the audio-visual chaos of a Chems gig in a confined space. The East London screening I went to had several dozen audience members literally dancing in the aisles by the end, something I haven't seen at a movie since, erm, U2's Rattle And Hum in the late 80s. Anyway, for those of you who missed it in cinemas in February, Don't Think is now available in a DVD/CD package for you to recreate the experience at home. You may have to put your eyeballs directly onto the TV screen to get the same level of visual impact, but at least you can crank up the bass higher than most cinemas would normally dare.

Simian Substitute Site For March 2012: Monkee Business: The Musical

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR FEBRUARY 2012

Books: Just My Type by Simon Garfield is the latest in his long line of non-fiction books. (I believe that up until now, the only one I've read is The Nation's Favourite, his retelling of the mid-90s turmoil at Radio 1.) Type looks at the history of the printed word and the font, and how our relationship with them has changed over the years from Caxton to Comic Sans. Garfield reveals the tricks of the trade, showing the tiny details that can change the emotional impact of simple letters. Packed with entertaining anecdotes, and frequently revealing things that have been under your nose for decades, it's a book that literally makes you look at the world differently after reading it. In my case, right now I'm looking at the collected spines of my DVD collection and twitching violently.

Internet: Hype alert! There's a new piece by me on Mostly Film today. Yes, again. Monoglot Movie Club: City Of Drizzle is another one of those articles looking at the fun to be had going to the pictures in a foreign country, in this case Brazil. I'd do the usual trick of putting up some additional background material for the piece here, but I'm doing this thing instead, so come back tomorrow and I'll have some São Paulo restaurant recommendations for you. (If it's already tomorrow or later, there should be a link at the top of this page to take you there.)

Movies: I didn't mention it at the time, but at last year's London Film Festival I walked past Michael Fassbender on the red carpet while he was on his way into a screening. I Did Not See His Cock, as they say on Popbitch. That had to wait until a few days ago, when I finally caught up with Shame, the movie he was on his way into. Steve McQueen's study of sex addiction works as a general study of obsession, and there's no denying that Fassbender and Carey Mulligan give incredibly brave performances throughout. But it's hard to connect with them as characters: it's the story of a man who's become detached from the world, and McQueen puts another layer of detachment on top of that as he coolly observes his disintegration. You end up zooming in on the little details: the familiar-looking Felix The Cat cartoon playing out-of-focus in the background of Fassbender and Mulligan's big scene, or the route of Fassbender's late-night jog. Still, it's a beautiful-looking movie, with cinematographer Sean Bobbitt making New York look as gorgeous as he made London look in Wonderland.

Telly: By Jupiter's COCK, Spartacus is good isn't it? I admit, I came to it late, as I do far too often with TV shows nowadays. I'd heard lots of people talking about it - bemused sneering from Charlie Brooker, abject horror from John Bishop - but the first time I actually saw it for myself was when I watched the whole of the prequel series Spartacus: Gods Of The Arena in one six-hour binge during a long-haul flight. Its reputation as the goriest, sweariest, shaggiest thing on television is wholly justified: but in Arena (and I believe, the original Spartacus: Blood And Sand which is still sitting in my DVD in-tray), all those elements are there as support to a gradually emerging story that becomes the most important part. Now we're at Spartacus: Vengeance, and the episode that's just aired in both the US and UK (Libertus) is one of the most thrilling hours of telly I've seen in years, pulling together half a season's worth of plotlines and then ripping them all up in an apocalyptic climax. My only concern is that there's still half a season to go...

Simian Substitute Site For February 2012: The Monkey King: Uproar In Heaven

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR JANUARY 2012

Books: Good God, this song is thirty years old. January saw the tentative return of Alexei Sayle to the comedy circuit, after several years away concentrating on books. Still, when the books are as ace as Stalin Ate My Homework, I'm not going to begrudge him the time off. A memoir of his childhood and teenage years, it describes Alexei growing up in 1950s/60s Liverpool with his Communist parents Joe and Molly. It's especially good when it covers his growing political awareness: initially happy to play along with the family's party line (especially when his dad's union connections get them special treatment on Eastern Bloc holidays), but slowly losing his faith as he enters his teens. It's only towards the end of the book that the teenage Alexei starts to discover his gift for retelling stories in a way that amuses other people:  "in the right hands events could be chopped and shaped and filleted until they came out exactly as you wanted them to come out, just like election results in the Soviet Union." Is there more of this particular set of events to come in future volumes? I hope so.

Movies: A belated kung hei fat choi to all our Chinese readers (ha!) as we enter the Year of the Dragon. The last time I said that in one of these pieces was two years ago, when I marked Chinese New Year by seeing the seasonal romcom All's Well Ends Well 2010. This year, I celebrated with All's Well Ends Well 2012, which has no thematic link whatsoever to the earlier film beyond the title. It's been entertaining watching the UK critics completely failing to understand the cultural context this film exists in: a bit of ultra-lightweight fluff that the whole Chinese family can enjoy during a holiday period when energy levels and standards are low. Eschewing the period setting of AWEW 2010, this edition consists of four modern-day love stories featuring a host of local stars goofing it up, like Donnie Yen in a silly wig playing a failed rock star, and Chapman To as a romantic novelist who everyone insists is ugly as sin. (But unlike co-star Louis Koo, at least he doesn't look like Gary Glitter.) It's full of contrived plotting, incomprehensible regional humour, and musical numbers which build towards an OTT finale which, bizarrely, steals its tune from the closing song from Fame. But it's entertaining enough, and I'd be happy to catch All's Well Ends Well 2013, which will probably be shot in 3D and set inside a video game, or something.

Music: It started off with me finding out about the existence of this and this. Which gradually led to the development of this. Which got me wondering: whatever happened to The Rubberbandits, the Irish guys who went viral in Christmas 2010 with their song Horse Outside? It turns out they've been busy, and have even got a London gig planned for March. In the last few months they've released a double album called Serious About Men, and they've shot a few of those Comedy Blaps things that Channel 4 have been spraying over the internet recently. (See also: Business Mouse, Viz.) Songs like the so-anti-racist-it's-actually-racist Black Man and the deeply emotional Spastic Hawk hold up to multiple listens and without the backup of the visuals, which is hella rare for comedy records these days. Let's just call them The Lonely Ireland and have done with it.

Simian Substitute Site For January 2012: Blue Lunar Monkey

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR DECEMBER 2011

Books: Steve Earle writes and performs country music. You probably knew that. You may also have spotted him acting in a couple of David Simon telly shows like Treme and The Wire. But you might not have realised that he writes books too. His latest novel, I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive, is set in San Antonio in the early Sixties, and tells the story of a small community centred around Doc - once Hank Williams' dope supplier, now a junkie making a living as an abortionist. The first half of the book carefully draws the characters that surround Doc, and does it with such non-judgmental humanity that you hope they can defeat the prophesy implied in the novel's title. If there's a flaw, it's in the way that a character is introduced in the second half whose sole purpose is to break up the curiously idyllic life that gradually develops around the boarding house where Doc lives and works. But the narrative drive is strong enough to keep you going to the end - Earle has proven form in telling stories that span three to four minutes, but here he demonstrates that he can do it just as well over a couple of hundred pages.

Comedy: Over the last few years, Go Faster Stripe have released a series of lovingly packaged DVDs and CDs featuring the best of contemporary British comedy. But it has to be admitted that they've outdone themselves with Fist Of Fun Series 1, the first telly outing for much-loved-round-these-parts double act Stewart Lee and Richard Herring. The press release tells the full story: the BBC have been sitting on the show's tapes since 1995 with no intention of ever doing anything with them. So Lee and Herring, along with GFS head honcho Chris Evans (no, not that one), raised the money to buy the rights and release the show on DVD themselves. And it's a terrific package: all six episodes, with multiple commentaries, plus raw footage from the studio recordings, a live video, a new interview with Lee and Herring, and oodles of DVD-ROM material, spread over four DVDs. If this sells well, they promise to provide the same treatment for the second Fist Of Fun series, as well as their other BBC2 show, This Morning With Richard Not Judy. I am wanking as I write this.

Movies: You'd have thought that after the debacle of Ra.One a couple of months ago, I'd have learned to keep away from 3D movies starring Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan. It's a good job that I hadn't learned that, because his new one Don 2 is actually pretty good. Whereas Ra.One was labouring under the whole weight of being The Most Expensive Film Ever Made In India, Don 2 is a straightforward heist flick made with a blatant eye to the international market. Given that Indian cinema is notorious for what it chooses to show or not show, it's interesting to discover the Don franchise, a series of stories about a murdering drug-dealing thief who we're meant to sympathise with solely because he's played by the most famous actor in India at the time (Amitabh Bachchan in the 1970s original, SRK in the new remakes). After a slowish first half full of setup, the robbery itself is a smartly shot and edited piece of work, delivering all the thrills and spills you'd hope for. (And, as noted at the start, it's in 3D. Do you have a pair of red/blue 3D glasses lying around the house? Then watch this. Note that the 3D in the actual film is much better, though.)

Simian Substitute Site For December 2011: Gobble Monkey

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR NOVEMBER 2011

Music: Getting close to year end now, which means that I'm trawling through all the records I bought in 2011 in preparation for my traditional Pick Of The Year compilation. Along the way, I've been musing about the state of The Album as a concept, and how the way we listen to music has changed over the decades. Take Florence And The Machine's new record, Ceremonials, as an example: I've enjoyed the raw bombast of individual tracks when I've heard them on the radio, but trying to listen to twelve of the buggers in a row is absolutely unbearable. Kate Bush's 50 Words For Snow, on the other hand, is an old-fashioned album: it has a theme, a sequence, an ebb and flow to it that makes it work brilliantly as a piece. In another old-fashioned touch, it also has a whimsical comedy song which doesn't entirely work, much like serious bands used to do in the seventies. Nevertheless, I'm pretty certain that Kate will be making an appearance on this year's compilation, and Florence won't. Wait and see.

Telly: Obviously I'm way behind everyone else here, but I'm making my way through series one of the top-rated middle-class jumper porn that they call Forbrydelsen, and we call The Killing. (Series two is currently in progress on BBC 4, and I felt I had some catching up to do.) It's a good, solid police procedural: it doesn't really do anything radical with the genre, other than show a remarkable determination in keeping its focus on its central crime story for the full twenty hours, without branching off into issue-of-the-week subplots to pad out its running time. Enjoyable as hell, but I've been getting somewhat distracted by the realisation that dodgy politician Troels Hartmann has a lookalike. "Nanna Birk Larsen. RIP. Miss you big man. Gone but not forgotten."

Travel: I've spent a few days in Ireland this month, thanks to work: a week-long assignment in Navan, one of the world's few palindromic towns. (Adaven Nevada can just piss right off, frankly.) For a small town, it's got a lot to offer: a nice hotel, plenty of fine restaurants (from a perfectly decent chippy to a slap-up posh nosherie, with a good brasserie and curryhouse in between), and an acceptable cinema. Amusingly, it turns out that the cinema had a brief period of YouTube fame a few years ago, thanks to their answerphone message around the time that Bruno came out. God knows what they'd make of Sensation, the cheerfully mucky new Irish film that I caught in Dublin on the way to Navan, and which Lesley reported on here over a year ago.

Simian Substitute Site For November 2011: Powder Monkey Fireworks

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR OCTOBER 2011

Comics: Anna Mercury (last published April 2010). Doktor Sleepless (last published August 2009). Fell (last published January 2008). Desolation Jones (last published December 2006). My magazine rack has all these examples of comics series which Warren Ellis has started, and then put on extended hiatus partway through owing to production issues and/or finding something else to do. Up until last week, I would have included Captain Swing And The Electrical Pirates Of Cindery Island in that list: but the fourth and final issue has just come out, some twenty months after the first one. Illustrated in the over-elaborate Avatar Press house style by Raulo Caceres, it shows Ellis racking up a number of events from the 1830's - the formation of the London Metropolitan Police, the discovery of electromagnetic induction, the reign of terror of the mysterious Spring-Heeled Jack - and mashing them into an entertaining steampunk thriller, with pirates thrown in for good measure. It has all the usual Ellis trademarks: political subtext that never quite stays as subtext, sudden bursts of messy violence, and constantly inventive swearing. "More money than I could spend in this life... I could buy a country with the change from having my cock cast in gold every day!" He's still a knob for blocking me on Twitter, though.

Movies: The big Bollywood movie for Diwali is Ra.One, reportedly the most expensive film made to date in India. It's been hyped to high heaven over the last few months, as it would need to be to have any hope of making its money back. But two days after its mid-week opening, I caught it on a Friday night playing to a quarter-full house. It's the story of a video game designer (played by Shahrukh Khan), the 'ultimate villain' he creates (the Ra.One of the title), and what happens when that villain breaks out of the game and into the real world. The much-touted effects are okay, but they pale in comparison to the sheer unbridled mentalism of last year's YouTube hit Robot (explicitly referenced at one point). And they're obviously where all the money has gone: the 3D conversion is somewhat basic, the script even more so. Anubhav Sinha directs the whole thing like Michael Bay without the subtlety - the first, London-based half in particular is painful to watch with its over-frantic cutting. It's got to be a bad sign that just four days after watching Ra.One, I couldn't tell you anything about its ending, except that the end title crawl lasts over ten minutes and they run out of music halfway through it.

Music: There's an important question to be asked about Tom Waits' Bad As Me: which dimmo had the bright idea of fixing a non-removable sticker directly onto its cardboard sleeve? Particularly when it's just a sticker full of words from various magazines telling us it's one of the best albums of the year. Underneath the sticker are the words 'Tom Waits', which basically would have told us the same thing. It feels like a Waits Greatest Hits compilation, taking styles and themes from everything he's done over the last thirty years, but with all new songs (his first new songs in seven years, lest we forget). It's all comfortingly familiar and splendidly new at the same time. Interested in finding out more? Then why not come to Tom's Private Listening Party?

Simian Substitute Site For October 2011: Monk3ys

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR SEPTEMBER 2011

Books: Back in August when I used to write stuff regularly for this site - yeah, yeah, things should start picking up again shortly, promise - anyway, you might recall that comedian Robin Ince was one of our primary sources of irritation during this year's Edinburgh Festival, due to the under-publicised arrangements for getting into one of his shows. If nothing else, the incident has made me all the more impressed at The Belated Birthday Girl's ability to keep a straight face. Because while I was sitting in Edinburgh bars berating Ince for his poor organisational skills, she had to suppress her knowledge that she'd already bought me a copy of his book for my upcoming birthday. Still, I can't complain, because it's actually quite a fun read. Robin Ince's Bad Book Club is the hard copy version of the show he's been doing for several years now, in which he takes a series of cheap paperbacks gathered from countless visits to charity shops and holds them up to ridicule. It suffers from the thing that makes Ince's stand-up and journalism occasionally tiresome to read - his insistence on deliberately exposing himself to the worst of what humanity can offer, just so he can get annoyed about it. (Which, for me, tends to be less funny and more annoying.) But his joy at the guilty pleasure that crap literature can provide is infectious: and when he makes the bold statement "if you have not read The Rats you were not born between 1954 and 1976", it brought back happy memories of James Herbert's paperbacks being passed around under the desks in school, always falling open naturally at the dirty bits.

Internet: It's the scientific breakthrough from Japan we've all been waiting for: a motorcycle with a toilet built into the saddle, that runs off your own poo. You could read about it in English at Tokyo Mango, but you're probably better off going to the official site of its manufacturer Toto and shoving the Toilet Bike Neo Project blog through the translation software of your choice. (Nifty is the most reliable one out there, as long as you select the 日本語英語 option to go from Japanese to English rather than the other way round.) The blog is probably worth revisiting throughout October, as the bike is just about to start a one-month promotional tour of Japan, presumably ridden by someone with a massively underdeveloped sense of shame.

Movies: Back in August, I wrote about the Scala Forever film festival for Mostly Film (with a little extra bonus material for here). Six weeks on, the festival finally ends this weekend with a screening of A Clockwork Orange, the film that notoriously finished off the Scala cinema completely. We ended up catching three of the festival's screenings ourselves. At the Prince Charles, we saw a fun double bill of The Terminator and Duel: most notable for being the second occasion at which I've tweeted the organisers during the interval of an event, and they've verbally responded to that tweet on stage at the start of the second half. (Coincidentally, the first time this happened was at one of Robin Ince's shows.) We also fitted in our first ever visit to the utterly charming Roxy Bar And Screen: their all-day Hong Kong action festival was just as patchy as the Scala's all-dayers used to be, consisting of two solid-gold classics (A Better Tomorrow, Eastern Condors) and two not-so-classics (Tiger Cage 2, The Cat). Finally, the comparatively posh surroundings of the ICA were an ideal location for a restored print of The Ballad Of Narayama: Shohei Imamura's combination of weirdness and rudeness seems like the perfect way to remember the Scala. It's just a shame that London cinemas can now only sustain a selection of movies like this for a six-week festival, rather than all year round.