Mark Charan Newton

The Guardian newspaper has shown a fascinating gallery of original Watchmen sketches online. I never knew that Rorschach’s face changed on every sketch. I wonder if the movie will manage to replicate that some how?

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There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.

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Double music bonanza this weekend. I love the Guillemots. They’re one of the most original bands around, and fabulous live. They’re genuinely passionate about music, and it shows so much.

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You remember when Gordon Brown used terror laws on something that wasn’t, you know, blowing up people and stuff? Well the Icelandic people have created this website in response. Look at those faces of the terror! All clearly guilty!

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Two young men talked in some local hand-language, their sentences needing a gesture and a glance for completion. Kids were sliding on patches of ice in horizontal freefall. A couple walked by, the blonde woman much younger than the man, and he judged them ‘respectable’ by the quality of their clothing. He was tempted to make eye contact with the woman, perhaps tease a reaction out of her. It seemed to matter, stealing a smile from that man’s life.

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Lanterns were being lit by citizens who maybe had expected a brighter day. Glows of orange crept through the dreary morning, defining the shapes of elaborate windows, wide octagons, narrow arches. It had been a winter of bistros with steamed-up windows, of tundra flowers trailing down from hanging baskets, of constant plumes of smoke from chimneys, one where concealed gardens were dying, starved of sunlight, and where the statues adorning on once-flamboyant balconies were now suffocating under lichen.

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Back again, Marx is back, tell a friend. [End of riffing on hip-hop lyrics]

Karl Marx is back in fashion, says one German publisher, who attributes his new popularity to the economic crisis.

Shame the old dude ruined it all with this, fo shizzle.

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He looked around at the clutter of junk filling the bedroom. It was all hers, of course. He was one of those who didn’t care to accumulate anything much. As soon as he’d finished with it, it was gone. His rooms had been bare, before she was around. She’d filled the void systematically, buying steadily over the years, nearly all of it antiques. Maybe much of it was junk, but it was her junk.

He had become comfortably used to her filling his otherwise empty life with objects of uncertain purpose, and he’d often wander around the house, simply to uncover items he’d have no recognition of.

It seemed to suggest something deeper about their relationship.

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Nothing had changed here for thirty or forty years, ever since it had been arrogated by the evening bohemians.

All along its lower walls were scribbles etched deep by knife blades over the centuries. Odes to lovers. Threats to all and anyone. Who watches the Night Guard? So-and-so sucks dicks. That sort of thing. Some of the cobbles were splashed with paint, too, and you could smell stale food despite the dampness. At night, lanterns would cast long, feral shadows down here, and if there was no breeze the darkness would become suffocating in such narrow confines.

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