Archive for June, 2003

Mainly For Accounting Purposes

I want to make quick notes about these few days, if only for the fact that if I don’t, I’ll forget how I managed to spend so much money and pass out when I get my bank statement.

Friday was relatively restrained. Dinner at good ol’ Sweet And Spicy never costs much more than £10 for both of us to stuff our faces. We decided to have a walk down to Columbia Road rather than go to the Califone gig I’d been pondering originally. We were looking for a drink, and wavered outside a particular pub. Peering in revealed an almost totally male clientele, and the fat slob staking out the pool table didn’t look as if he’d relinquish it willingly. Alec thought the place looked a bit loutish. Having had an awful day, I was, however, in dire need of alcohol, so we went in. The first thing I noticed was that it was playing George Michael. The second was that the bartender was a little camp and looked at us funny when we ordered drinks. The third was that the one woman I’d seen when I peered in appeared on closer inspection to have rather rugged features and didn’t seem to be wearing her own hair. When we left, everyone was singing “Anything you can do I can do better” and the slob was dancing.

Saturday being the day hippies were staking out Stonehenge, we decided to go to Greenwich for the summer solstice. Or at least, we walked through Greenwich Park to Blackheath, and toasted the summer solstice from the artificially-lighted insides of a rather nice microbrewery.

On Sunday I managed to visit Spitalfields market and only spend £10 (a T-shirt). All was going well, but then that night’s attempts to see electronica maestros Four Tet and Prefuse 73 at Plastic People fell through when the gig got totally sold out in advance, so we went to The Elbow Room instead for two hours of pool and several rounds of drinks. Team composition shifted constantly, and despite playing 5 or 6 games, some partnering Nick, and others partnering Alec, I can’t remember if my team ever won.

Monday was the first Tony Hawks day, which wasn’t the best intellectual preparation for Brand that night. But I must confess my motivations for seeing the play weren’t entirely intellectual to begin with. The Independent review begins thus: “Casting an actor of such extreme gorgeousness as Ralph Fiennes in the title role of Brand somewhat undermines the plausibility and point of Ibsen’s tormented hero,” to which I say undermine away, Ralph baby, you were scorching, which is impressive for any performance in a Norwegian play. (I am actually capable of deep commentary on the play, but I’m saving my deep commentary skills today for deconstructing the respective Canadian, US and German approaches to content neutrality in free speech adjudication.)

Tuesday wasn’t meant to be stupidly indulgent at all, but then I went and read the second Tony Hawks book, and a dinner trek with Alec to the seedier bits of King’s Cross ended up decidedly non-seedily in The Perseverance with blackened cajun salmon on a bed of rocket and cherry tomatoes, eton mess with assorted berries for dessert, and a lovely Rioja.

Yesterday I met Jiawen and Gwen for dinner at Little Bay (lovely, I’ll definitely be back). Today I’m watching Henry V. On Friday Benny’s doing a birthday thing. On Saturday I’m going to the Bridget Riley exhibition at the Tate Britain with Russ. I am fervently hoping nothing comes up on Sunday or Monday. And on Tuesday the damn dissertation is due, whether or not I have finished writing it.

  June 26, 03 | Londoner Forever | Closed

The One Where Alec Does Strange Things With Food

The other day he popped out to get us some lunch. Standing in line in the cafe, reading the sandwich menu, he was delighted to see “fried banana” under “sausage” in the list of sandwich ingredients you could have. Elsewhere in his culinary explorations, he cooks a mean breadcrumbed bacon steak in whisky sauce, and apparently an alternative to the whisky sauce (although somehow we’ve never deviated from the booze route, you wonder why) you can actually do the bacon with fried banana.

So he reaches the counter, and happily orders a ham and fried banana sandwich, whereupon the poor confused cashier who is probably on the minimum wage and really doesn’t need this kind of weirdness goes “Huh?” and Alec rechecks the menu only to realize that it actually read “Fried sausage” and “Banana” rather than “Sausage” and “Fried banana”, banana presumably being sold in its capacity as fruity accompaniment to sandwich rather than actually lurking within, but by now it’s too late and he’s a bit confused too, so he says yes, he wants a ham and banana sandwich, and he gets this ham and banana sandwich and takes it back to the flat and says here, Michelle, a ham and banana sandwich.

Meanwhile, until recently there was a huge watermelon with a funnel in it on my dining table, and a bottle of Smirnoff. He was trying to infuse the melon with vodka.

  June 25, 03 | Alecdotes | Closed

Unhappily Distracted

When you are one week away from dissertation deadline, and are so worried about being wastefully distracted from your finely-honed dissertation production routine that you have taken the dramatic step of packing up laptop, books, photocopied articles and a couple days’ worth clothing and hefting it all to Alec’s hopefully distraction-free flat, you don’t expect to find yourself having read two entire non-dissertation material books in two days at the end of it all.

Given that the last author you mentioned reading on this site was Salman Rushdie, it is even less expected that these two books will both have been written by Tony Hawks. Let me explain.

On Monday I wanted something to read over breakfast, and surveyed Alec’s bookcase. I should say, for the sake of fairness, that it does contain many fine volumes brimming with literary merit, but I don’t like that over breakfast when I am trying to write a dissertation, which is why I decided The Vision Of Dante (1894 edition, respect!), and Baudelaire, The Complete Verse would have to wait. Here were some of my other options:

  • Classic Irish Whisky, Jim Murray. Too basic. After all, I am an authority on Classic Irish Whisky Breath and have no need for such entry-level efforts.
  • The Catechism Of The Catholic Church. Perhaps some other time.
  • The Story Of Lucy Gault, William Trevor. I would have read this, but after Two Lives recently felt like struggling my way through a literary quicksand of depression and tragedy, I need a little time before my next foray into William Trevor world.
  • Playing The Moldovans At Tennis, Tony Hawks

Well, there you go then. It was riveting. I confessed my daytime exploits to Alec who found this highly amusing given my usual literary pretension.

On Tuesday I wanted something to read over breakfast, and surveyed the bookcase again. Here were further options:

  • Les Miserables (Volume Two). No volume one. Go figure.
  • On The Genealogy Of Morals, Nietzsche. A gift from me, I must confess. He read it politely. I owe me no such politeness.
  • The Ultimate Pipe Book, Richard Carleton Hacker. See entry for Classic Irish Whisky.
  • Round Ireland With A Fridge, Tony Hawks.

So Alec calls at lunch and asks solicitously how I’m doing with the dissertation. “Well,” I venture with quavering, self-hating voice, “Tony’s just left Ennistymon, they wanted to take the fridge scuba-diving but thought better of it in the end.”

  June 25, 03 | Favourite Posts and Words | Closed
Tags: ,

Hail To The Thief - First Impressions

On first three listens to Hail To The Thief, the songs which are standing out to me are Backdrifts, I Will and Wolf At The Door. But anything could happen between now and 7 July (when, after four years of trying and failing to get Radiohead tickets because they sell out in this country within 10 minutes, I’ll finally, finally, finally get to see the band live, although I’ll have to go to Italy for it). Meanwhile, I haven’t been this excited about listening to a new release (by any artist) since, well, Amnesiac, and there’s a whole 56.37 minutes’ worth of fascinating sounds to explore here, plus supercool limited edition roadmap packaging and sleeve notes! (Just grant me this small joy, will you, I’m writing a fucking dissertation.)

  June 20, 03 | Music Geekery | Closed
Tags:

Recipe

[I meant to post this about the weekend.]

Have picnic lunch on Regent’s Park grass, then stroll through the park taking in London panorama on Primrose Hill. Leisurely consume several pints and packets of addictive pork scratchings over the Sunday papers in a pub with jazz band and immensely endearing bulldog. Add good company in the form of Alec and Matt.

Stir and serve on Sunday.

Enjoy.

[Can you tell I am trying not to write an essay?]

  June 17, 03 | Londoner Forever | Closed

Fury (Salman Rushdie) - First Impressions

Fury contains an overwhelming maelstrom of socio-economic-cultural-political-philosophical-mythological-literary-you-name-it-he-references-it references Rushdie pulls out and brandishes before the (probably, well anyway I am) less well-read reader.

My first reaction to this is to feel very stupid. I mean yeah, when he talks of Spinoza and Derrida, I know they’re philosophers; when he refers to Alex Portnoy and Mr Roth I know he means Philip; and when he mentions Jil Sander power suits and Marcus Schenkenberg hell yeah I know what he’s talking about there, but when he describes a building with a cornerstone etching of “to Pythianism”, I’m afraid I must admit I was unaware that this was a clash of Greek and Mesopotamian metaphors, or that Pytho was the ancient name of Delphi, or that Pythian verse is written in the dactylic hexameter, so thank you for telling me, Mr Rushdie.

My second reaction is that he’s trying a little too hard. In describing a girl, I don’t quite get the need to include that she is wearing a black D’Angelo Voodoo baseball cap, except so that Rushdie can say look at me peeps, I still got love fo’ the streets. When describing a commercial featuring a group of fashionable vampires wearing Ray-Bans, I don’t quite get the need to explain that “thanks to Buffy on TV, vampires were hot”. It’s something I noted about The Ground Beneath Her Feet as well. I can’t say there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just that I have this recurring mental image of Salman Rushdie doing Dr Evil’s “I’m cool…I’m hip…t-chk-a-chk-a-chk-a etc.” routine, and it’s kinda scary.

But it’s early days yet. I’m only 49 pages into the book, and although I may poke a little fun at him now and then, Salman Rushdie is still a writer whose mastery and flair with the English language makes me quail and kowtow and wonder why the hell anyone ever bothers reading this website when they could be reading Salman Rushdie.

  June 17, 03 | Words | Closed
Tags:

This is ridiculous. I should

This is ridiculous. I should be writing an essay about comparative hate speech jurisprudence. Instead, I am Michael Portillo, Downing Street Fighter. In a blaze of Tory glory I kicked the arses of Charles Kennedy and Robin Cook against backdrops of first the London Underground and then a pyre of dead cows. Unfortunately, Iain Duncan Smith just KO’d me in the streets of Belfast in front of an Orange Order march. How very embarrassing. I’ll beat you another day, bald boy.

[Thanks for the link, John. Here’s another one you might enjoy.]

  June 16, 03 | Links | Closed

Traitor

The July issue of Glamour is out, and as I peruse its glossy pages (courtesy of Tamara, household supplier) I grapple again with the fact that I am a traitor to my sex.

I’m not meek or submissive. I don’t buy the whole “surrendered wife” thing, neither do I believe in The Rules. I certainly believe a woman can have a successful career and be a great wife and mother at the same time, and should be allowed to do so. No, my friends, my betrayal goes beyond such peripheral issues to strike at the very core of womanhood: I prefer sensible, comfortable shoes to silly pretty ones.

I run screaming from any shoe heel that isn’t at least as wide as, well, my heel. No hobbling around on mildly obese pins for me. I like walking the streets knowing I could charge after a snatch thief or sprint for the bus if I had to. I insist on clubbing in shoes I can actually dance in rather than twitch awkwardly from side to side. I acknowledge that stiletto heels look elegant and feminine, but do not think I would look particularly elegant or feminine while shuffling along screaming in pain from my blistered feet and falling down frequently. Of course, there is the argument that many women the world over manage to spend the day striding around in 6 inch heels, which may also include breaking into the Kremlin and acrobatic sex depending on whether or not they’re in a Bond movie, but I just wasn’t born with that gene, okay?

While we’re on the topic of shoes and betraying my sex, I’m not even sure if I’m normal as regards numbers. According to Glamour I am meant to have cupboards overflowing with them. I have a small shoe rack from Argos with space left over on its top tier for two (sickly) houseplants. Here is the extent of my consternation - under a rarely-felt impulse to make too much information available to the world, I hereby list the contents of my shoe rack and ask fellow females (male views welcome too, unless you’re Alec who already makes his views on my shoes all too clear) out there to comment on my normality.

  • Dark grey slip-on trainers (Acupuncture), bought for £50 in my first year in college and worn pretty much every day since then. My shoe of choice for clubbing and holidays where I spend hours walking.
  • Black lace-up trainers (Nike) for my rare attempts at land-based exercise.
  • Red lace-up casual shoes (Mango) which I love because they’re red.
  • Light grey slip-ons (some cheapie brand, I think they cost $20) with lines in orange. Rip-offs of those types of trainer that hug the shape of the foot extremely closely.
  • Khaki casual rubber-soled slip-ons with two stripes, one navy blue and one burgundy (Shelly’s). They look better than this description makes them sound, I promise. Current favourites given that I am going through a brown phase.
  • Chocolate brown strappy open-toed shoes with slightly chunky 2.5 inch heels.
  • White strappy open-toed shoes with 2.5 inch heels.
  • White slouchy sandals with subtle leaf detail and a sort of toe strap (I really need to read more girly mags to bone up on the lingo)
  • Black courts with ankle strap, heels about 2.5 inches.
  • Black strappy evening shoes, 2.5 inch heels
  • Silver strappy evening shoes, 3 inch heels
  • Dark purple punk whore boots, a Christmas present from Alec a month and a half after we started going out.

Despite the fact that I think this is a veritable shitload of shoes, apparently I am meant to own more, and they’re meant to be sillier. It’s so hard being a girl.

  June 13, 03 | Favourite Posts and Pop Culture | Closed

Nick Cave (Hammersmith Apollo, London, June 2003)

There are many sorts of gig.

Sometimes a gig’s in a small dingy bar, you’re all about three feet from the band, who is unknown and always will be because face it, they’re mediocre, and people in the front are taking bets on what deodorant (if any) the drummer uses. You’re having a good time partly because the bands are, and mostly because you’re drunk.

Sometimes you’re a notch higher, somewhere equally small but with ventilation and candles and organic ales and bands you have actually heard of, although this isn’t because they’re actually famous, it’s just because you spend way too much time reading music sites on the Internet. After the set, the band still steps off the foot-high stage, buys pints, and mingles with the crowd. I like these gigs. You get at least three bands for less than the price of an album, and you get to feel all indie until you make the mistake of trying to chat to the bands, at which point you make some horribly embarrassing remark and spend the rest of the evening alternately crippled and tickled by your own idiocy. (Okay, so the last bit of this may just be me.)

And then sometimes you see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at the Hammersmith Apollo.

I’ve been trying, since we saw him on Friday, to write something here that would do the show justice, that would be able to go beyond recitation of a setlist to actually evoking what it was like to be me, so overwhelmed by the power of The Mercy Seat that I was actually on the point of tears. Today I admit defeat - I can’t come up with the review I want to write, I can only churn out badly phrased, probably cliched stream-of-consciousness impressions of two songs amazingly performed, and tack on bits here and there about the rest. So here goes. It’s all a bit convoluted.

He started with Wonderful Life from the new album, sounding overwrought and a bit off-tune and I was suddenly worried I’d just wasted £23, sucked in by a Big Name who could no longer deliver. But then the next song was Red Right Hand, which started off almost playful and loungy, Nick almost whispering “He’s a god, he’s a man, he’s a ghost, he’s a guru” like a conspiratorial secret-sharing, the chorus section surprisingly sedate (I don’t remember even hearing the bell), which made it all the more climactic by the time he was spitting “You’re a microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan, designed and directed by his RED RIGHT HAND” with crashing bells, flashing red lights and pounding piano, and at that point I stopped worrying.

Then West Country Girl and a beautiful ballad I didn’t know, Hallelujah, Do You Love Me, Bring It On (a real clunker from the new album, and the low point of the gig for me), Henry Lee (which lost something in its conversion to stage rawk - snarling “La la la la la” just didn’t really work very well as compared to dueting liltingly with PJ Harvey on the album version), Still In Love With You, Watching Alice.

Then he sat down at the piano and started playing something that sounded like it would be a ballad, until he sang “It began when they come took me from my home and put me on Dead Row” and oh my God, it was The Mercy Seat, but dramatically slowed down and every word carrying a horror and power surpassing anything I ever felt listening to the record. Halfway through, the pace started to quicken, tension started to build, I sat transfixed on the edge of my seat as lights flashed, the tragedy unfolded, the violin screeched like a demented banshee (I really must go get a Dirty Three album, if that was Warren Ellis, he was fantastic), and always that voice, thundering in the middle of the storm: “And the mercy seat is waiting. And I think my head is burning.” But somewhere something’s got to give, eventually the condemned man’s spasms too must cease; we gradually returned to the slow ominous gloom of the piano, he sang the final chorus with its agonizing, infuriating last line, then black out, and I sat in the darkness with heart racing, a lump in my throat, and goose-pimples.

Another song I didn’t know. Then From Her To Eternity, Wild World, and they left the stage. We screamed, stamped, whistled and clapped for ages. They came back, played Into My Arms and Tupelo, and left. We screamed, stamped, whistled and clapped for ages. They came back and sang He Wants You and Deanna, and this time it was the last time, and as we left the venue I worried briefly that Califone at the Spitz (gig venue category: small, arty, candles etc.) this Friday would pale in comparison.

What I like most about Nick Cave on record was displayed in abundance seeing him live - his strong versatile voice capable of both punk shrieking and intimate balladeering. What I didn’t realize about the Bad Seeds on record came across blindingly clearly live - they’re a bloody fantastic band, and delivered every song with more depth and texture than I ever noticed on the record (this is incredibly rare in my opinion - most bands struggle just to sound as good as they do on record, and many fail to do even that).

This year has really been a gig goldmine for me, and this was another one to treasure.

  June 12, 03 | Music Geekery | Closed
Tags: ,

Purchase Notes (7 CDs)

From Django last week:

  • Wilco: Being There
  • Unwound: Single History 1991-1997
  • Magoo: Vote The Pacifist Ticket Today
  • Aereogramme: Sleep And Release

From CD-WOW this week:

  • Radiohead: Hail To The Thief (I forked out £2 more for the limited edition version with special packaging. I know that’s sad sucker behaviour, but I figured I’m already forking out over £100 to go see them in Italy, and another £2 makes little difference to my sad geekness)
  • Four Tet: Rounds
  • Mogwai: Happy Songs For Happy People

Somebody please stop me.

  June 11, 03 | Music Geekery | Closed
Tags:
  • Page 1 of 2
  • 1
  • 2
  • >

Syntaxfree At Flickr

Monthly Archives