In America, even the subs are super. As a Brit committed to the cause of underestimation, deprecation and bullishly blase back-footedness, I baulk at the insidious infiltration of that asinine adjective into the Queen’s E. Once the preserve of consonant-clipped, gym-slipped gals from Hampshire, super has been adopted by gloss-lipped, French-tipped, semi-illiterate US fashionistas and is now regularly to be found injecting a kind of affected, caffeinated excitement into our own magazines. It is a magnificent way of expressing enthusiasm paired with ennui. Perfect for a world where everything is eternally supernew, superhot. Supersuper.

One thing New Yorkers do superwell is effort, even in the midst of attempted effortlessness. Last Thursday I supercasually dropped into the VICE live music knees-up at Santos’ Party House on Lafayette (after some louche literary linguine at Elaine’s), and was plunged into a scene that could been wet-dreamed into reality by those excellent online East Side street-dandy-spotters at ShitThreadsNoFriends and The Sartorialist.

Girls: shirts thick and plaid and shorts micro, circa circa Annie Hall 1977; nipples errant and hair long, loose and tousled circa Woodstock milkmaid 1969; specs oblong and black circa Buddy 1958. Boys: shirts thin and ratty and jeans skinny and grubby circa Blake Fielder Civil 2007; hair long, loose and tousled and beards thick and tortured circa JC 0BC; specs oblong and black circa Buddy 1958.

The music was angry fuzzy-fi nonsense, but hey - we wandered superlonely as, like, sexy left bank lumberjack supermodel clouds.

I heart NY.

The best literary and filmic realism stems from meticulously constructed fakery. The English, masters of precise practical craftsmanship and emotional detachment, do it particularly well: we frigid orgasm-feigning voyeurs are brilliant at building sincere pieces of insincerity that hit the heart by tricking the mind. From Thackeray and Hardy to Eliot and Dickens, our great realist novels are composed of the very symptoms of sham: cliche, stereotyping, coincidence and highly selective symbolism abound.

David Lean and Great Expectations were made for each other. Like Dickens, he was an obsessive auteur who embraced artifice with full awareness of how real it feels. His films have been restored and remastered by the BFI, and even for a carniverous thespian goy like me, their The Lean Legacy launch event (to which I was escorted by the inestimable Master JSL) was heavy on the ham. As the likes of Nigel Havers, Prunella Scales and Edward Fox gathered in the NFT to introduce and explain their favourite Lean clips, his still-potent ability to remake the world anew shone through the freshly Botoxed celluloid. This is a must-see season for our jaded CGeyes.

Our current cinematic concept of reality involves gazing at the earth, not the sky. Authenticity is ruled by a Dogme-influenced ethic that demands untrained actors, steadycam aesthetics and a narrow focus on one socially-specific slice of life (Showing Now: Adulthood). A realist epic now seems unthinkable, with wider visions of the world relegated to ancient history (Showing Now: Mongol) or absolute fantasy (Showing Now: Narnia).

Brief Encounter’s stilted, saturated melodrama, Passage to India’s theatrical tableaux and Lawrence’s symbolism-heavy scenes can seem incredibly unreal to us today, but the BFI’s screenings have reminded me just how emotionally real each massive, mysterious, multiplicitous Lean world feels (and his interview with Maureen Pryor is priceless).

Blow out the match, and face the sunrise.

Brief Encounter has a lot to answer for; the appropriation of much-loved music for a film score can feel intrusive and often belittling. There is an irrevolcable loss of innocence when a tender, treasured tune that has companionably quivered and nibbled at your earlobes for years is suddenly gang-raped into a hard little whorish soundbite before your ears, pressed into the service of some overblown indie epic or histrionic historical mamillorama. For a visual thinker and a writer, every melody has its own integral and insistent shape and story, so pimping out a stellar song as an extra in some prosaic picture feels like a dramatic as well as aural crime.

The problem is prettily pictured in Martin Wattenberg’s Shape of Song software, my lastest multisenosry obsession and a masterpiece of science and sensibility. Visualising the ‘deep structure of a composition’ by drawing ‘musical patterns in the form of translucent arches’ for pieces from Hendrix to Handel, these whorling works of geekart describe the distinct and sensuos spatial narratives that exist within these sounds: the tunes are scripts in themselves.

In fact, the soundtracks of Hans Zimmer, Ennio Morricone et al may try to fuck us blind and teary with an emotional blunderbuss, but at least they’re trained for purpose: supple sonic strumpets of infiinite variety. And even the tailor-made tunes are beginning to outclass the films they’re written for. John Williams’ pumping, phallic adventure themes may all sound the same, but they continue to pack a pore-prickling punch, and in Spielberg’s lastest Indy installment that familiar musical motif still makes you shiver and swell regardless of the neutered nonsense on screen.

I wish someone would make me a film that looked, sounded, smelt and felt like this.

Is there anything more deliciously dangerous than the engulfing, sticky sweetness of musty, milky motherlove? It’s the unctious umbilical ambrosia that makes us all into trapped, tantrumming tarbabies. But it sure does taste like heaven on a rusk.

The west end’s latest fringe fosterling, That Face, is a spunky little warning about the parallel perils of extreme parental attachment and abandonment. Penned by embryonic prodigy Polly Stenham, it features consummate pro Lindsay Duncan as a slummy mummy drowning in one part Waitrose gin to two parts lustful, leonine love for her not-so-little soldier Henry (the extraordinary Matt Smith), a gorgeously earnest, arty, fragile nearly-man who is equally intoxicated with amniotic fluid but struggling to save them both.

The play is not the divine birth that most critics are claiming. With Henry’s father the epitome of an emasculated, egocentric Englishman, and his younger sister Mia a quietly violent deliquent full of middle-aged ennui, the characters are all so damaged that the action is just one steady, unsurprising slope to destruction. But it is witty, waspy and yes, prematurely wise, and Jeremy Herrin’s production boasts acting as good as anything I’ve seen this year.

As I left the theatre, swaddled in thought, Balzac tapped me on the shoulder, grubby-fingered and beady-eyed. ‘A mother who is really a mother is never free’, said he, and shuffled off into the night. Ah, Honore, lad. Freedom’s overrated.

Come to mama, honey.

It’s time I came clean. Despite my fastidious facade as an A-List arbiter of aesthetic excellence - nay, the veritable Taste Tsarina of the zeitgeist - I have a sordid secret.

I am reading a fantasy novel.

I’m not talking Tolkien, with his musty, spunk-smelling arcania and fey, gay little songs. I don’t even mean the semi- socially acceptable Pratchett, with his winking, Dickensian dwarves and fulsome, frolicking footnotes. I mean the real, thousand page, ‘Lloris saw the pale steel of a Dhell clan dagger flash before her and turned with a swing of her platinum plait to espy the mighty wolves of Moragh descending the valley’ deal, beloved by middle-aged men with wispy beards and multicoloured pantaloons the wyrld over.

J.V.Jones has none of the restrained accomplishment of Rosemary Sutcliffe, Alan Garner and Ursula Le Guin, the robust historical humour of Bernard Cornwell and Conn Iggulden, or the pure brilliant weirdness of TH White. Her recently completed Sword of Shadows trilogy is undeniably over-ripe and under-edited, turgid tripe compared to my usual fare of lean literary Kobe beef - but it’s earnest, baroque bombast is so pleasurably, swellingly awful, I almost want to stop hiding it behind Orhan Pamuk dustjackets, pop on this Anna Sui ensemble, and out my inner clanswoman. Sort of.

Anyway, something tells me that Tennyson would have loved it. When the real world is recessive, weary and war-worn, sometimes you just have to give it a myth.

A Bank Holiday alone: a shimmering, cerulean depot of dreams. Plans are afoot.

Tonight I will spray an HB tag on Lambeth Tunnel at the Cans Festival, Banksy’s international street art gathering; on Saturday I will wander round Thomas Hope: Regency Designer at the V&A, drawing lissom little sketches in my Moleskine, before getting folked with the Blind Boys of Alabama at Camden’s Jazz Cafe; and on Sunday I will finally read DeLillo’s Underworld whilst grazing on new-season local asparagus spears dipped into homemade Hollandaise.

Or.

Tonight I will be colouring in the bleach marks on my black jeans with a whiteboard marker; on Saturday I will spend 5 hours trying on clothes and doing that list of ‘good outfits I never remember, which is why I always end up wearing the same black jeans with bleach marks’ and then 5 more hours re-assigning genres to my iTunes before I fall asleep clutching an empty bottle of Junipero; and on Sunday I will read C.J.Sansom’s Revelation whilst eating supersweet Green Giant with a spoon from the tin.

Eeny, meeny, miny.

The inestimable Evening Standard, that AMT Coffee-stained, crossword-completed, strewn-across-your-seat Chiltern Railways whore, has taken it’s plump, trembling, sovereign-ringed and sweat-stained finger off the racing pulse of the Nation. Usually so quick to pick up on a crisis, those misanthropic mass-hysteria mongers have failed to identify the biggest English emergency since, well, this.

Yes, a FIG ROLL SHORTAGE THREATENS THE NATION and only the internet seems to care. Sure, a good-time Blonde sometimes likes to hang at the docks with her hard-tack-tough, fly-flecked seaman Garibaldi; once in a while she shyly consents to be spoiled by her dark, glossy-maned, continental sugar-daddy Bhalsen - but a life without the unctious, gritty, soft-doughed embrace of her sweet, sticky poet Sultan Roll?

Now that is a state of terror. We need to detain some fucking wasps.

The line is Play it once, Sam, not Play it again, and now I know why. If the iPlayer had been around in 1940s filmworld Casablanca, Rick would be watching reruns of Sam on Later with Jools in his riad whilst Ilsa shunned gin joints to binge on out-of-season Desperate Housewives.

Introducing the ‘watch again’ concept into the life of an anachronistic Blonde who thinks TV is the disease that killed Little Nell, and who has four channels when the weather is good, is as dangerous as dumping a shipful of sixteenth century Spaniards onto the shores of the New World with an itch in their nethers and a nasty sneeze. 4oD may be as poorly designed and under-populated as Habitat in a recession, and ITV’s Catch Up proves once and for all that buffering is far less fun than it sounds, but with that televisual Tardis the iPlayer, the good old BBC have come up with something so rich, shiny and time-bendingly brilliant, it’s better than David Tennant doing Hamlet in John Galliano doublet ‘n hose.

Chaise lounging in my paisley peignoir, I have become the image of depravity. Reclusive, sallow and gritty-eyed, I am existing on nothing but a clutch of Medjool dates, a samovar of laudanum, and hourly doses of Mad Men. True, my general dishabille came in handy at the Experimental Cocktail Club of Paris’ Toulouse-Lautrec themed ball at Bungalow 8, but now I’m back in the boudior the bed sores are beginning to burn.

It’s time for Rapunzel to let down her iPlayer, shimmy down the tower, and do something wholesome. I think this is the beginning of an abusive relationship.

I’m afraid. So are you. There’s definitely something in the woodshed, and we can only hope it’s not an old man with a white beard, sandals, a faint smell of fish and a gun.

Julian Barnes’ new memoir/essay, Nothing To Be Frightened Of, shows that it’s life, not extinction, that gives panic its power. That kvetching kid Hamlet got it all wrong. We don’t dread the dreams that may come post-mortal coil, but the ones that haunt us now. And if you want to go down to the woods today and give yourself the creeps, pop on a Miu Miu red cape and drop into MOMA Oxford.

In theory, Katie Paterson’s installation - a wall-mounted halogen mobile number that connects to an underwater microphone recording the sound of icebergs sheering from the glaciar in Vatnajokull lagoon - sounds wearily concept-heavy, but the experience is actually startlingly, stirringly sad. The plaintive death-gurgle sounds shockingly familiar: bloody, breathy and blue. Give it a ring.

Romanian artist Mercia Cantor’s The Need for Uncertainty is similarly, stealthily disturbing. An arching nest of gilded cages, housing two real peacocks, supercilious and shitting, sprouts from a dirt floor. Overhead is a suspended flying carpet, hand-woven with emblems of aeroplanes and angels; on the wall is a large photograph of a tree, a spiky wooden symbol exploding from within its trunk, scattering sawdust blood over a witchy forest floor. These are mysterious, pan-cultural talismans of nature’s fairy-tale fantasy and dread, and they are exhilerating and haunting in equal measure.

In the words of fair Bill, the stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired. It’s life that’s the scary bastard.

Magazines are border literature. If novels are birds, mags are butterflies: ephemeral, colourful, their mortality demanding instant impact and flash. Slippery and shiny, they whisper evasive insecurity, coyly coaxing us away from sustained examination to surface dazzle and aspirational gauze. Alighting briefly on minefields of potential depth, danger and debate, they are too light to ignite, but make it all seem somehow the darker for the patter of their fragile feet.

I love ‘em. Reading them cover to cover, ads n’ all, I try to bestow upon them the dignity they crave. Despite being an inveterate non-collector, I find ditching them as distressing as hauling Blanche DuBois to the nuthouse. First are the weeklies, deep in despair at their instant demise: the brash, boozy binge-magz are just too depressed to be helped, but the Sunday broadsheet supplements are needily, brainily knowing enough to give a hit of croissant-flavoured cerebral crack. Monthlies are a little more hopeful, carefully smoothing on the slap, afraid of their mouthy younger sisters but slyly self-important. And then the quarterlies: stately, serious, masking their fear that they are old-fashioned with a pompous mouthful of stiff, creamy pulp. Strangest, most seductive of all are the nouveaux design mags - so beautiful, so expensive, so vacuous they dare you, just dare you, to dump them.

A weekly dose of The New Yorker, a monthly morsel of Vogue and a quarterly quaff of The Enthusiast is the meanest starvation diet I can endure. National Geographic, Wallpaper, Intelligent Life, New Scientist, even Miniature Donkey Talk under duress - if magazines are border literature, I’ve blazed my way, head bowed, through the checkpoints manned by proper books into a wasteland of barmy, brilliant bollocks. Sigh. I’m just gonna have to read my way out.