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a quick whip round

bugger this for a bowl of cornflakes. wheetos and soya milk - what would be the point? somethings are irreplacable, but that doesn't mean you have to hold on to them.

coming soon: 'like i love prince charming.' it sounds better than i thought it would.
coming even before that: dj gallow slutt vs aaron mcmullen, 'don't filter sweep tonight'. awaiting vocals.

what would improve my quality of life... a device like the last.fm scrobbler but listed all the songs that got stuck in your head.. it would be the worst mixtape ever...

so where were we... after newcastle.
mugison cancelled his show at the luminaire...

the weekend was world aids day, and rachel and i's 6 month anniversary. in honour of marking this milestone, purely for our own entertainment, we went to kew gardens. i picked up some sandwich ingredients first - awesome spicy cheese, decent bread, and vegerami (or something like anyway). so sandwiches and kew, we got there at two but at this time of year that means only two hours of daylight. we didn't even get as far as the compost heap. but we had a good nosey around about a fifth of it. then we bought a couple of plants from the shop at the train station - campulas and chillis (still alive at the time of writing). we went into the bookshop and looked up a nice restaurant to goto. 'blah blah blah' sounded quite good and it was only two stops away. still took us about an hour to get there though... an hour stuck in hammersmith... we got to goldhawk road, the restaurant was right there, so we went and found a nice pub. and a nice pub we found, the goldhawk, really nice in every way - hip but with good beer, board games, decent grub. we had nachos to start and they almost seemed wholemeal or something - really well textured. i found a shesh besh set - jess and alex always used to call it that. pretentious or right? - and played a few rounds. it turns out rachel is a terrible cheater, but she says i caught her everytime - how would i know? we got to the restaurant 15 minutes late and it seemed the waiter was the original joker. plonked us down next to the door, despite me saying about the cold - he said he'd keep an eye on it, but that didn't stop it opening. the music was... well, wonderwall. it appeared to be a ten year old mix that they surely played every night, over and over. the food was quite good but probably overpriced. we didn't want to go somewhere swish, we're not like that, but if the alternative was a nice soho cafe, we could do that anytime. it wasn't really worth the money we paid. i can't remember what we had now. afterwards we went back to the pub and played more backgammon, with me losing 2-1 resulting in her winning me as a for slave 64 days. damn doubling points system.
we came back here, and the next day i was meant to go to brighton to see off simon for south africa for, like, ever, but given the hecticacity of every recent weekend, and the fact i now had very little (i literally didn't have the money in my account to buy the train ticket, having given adrian more bills money than i really should have done), i just couldn't go. we played sam and max for a bit instead.

the next thursday was a wierd one. aaron was doing open mic, sam and i were up for a jam then a jaunt into town as a duet, and adrian was meant to come... the jam happened and it was great. stoned doom folk, followed by a fine chips kebab and discussion about going in for the raw food diet. i went off to finchley road and met him, alone. the guy who was up was really good in an undiscoverded open mic way... it was his rhymes. his rhymes were just great. not that i can remember any.

the next guy was just nickelback and he was shit.

then it was aaron's turn. now, as we had been stood there-ish, a couple of drunk girls had been, er, encouragin us to get on stage, and had in fact prompted us into performing together and me performing at all. then one of them started stroking me. then she just held my arm. a couple of songs into aaron's set now, and i had to take her and off me and smile politely. i would have said 'girlfriend', but it's impolite to talk innit? the two girls left immediatleyt without making eye contact with me again.

then everyone else in the room left
including the promoter
leaving me and the sound man
and aaron.

aaron and i did a song for the soundman, who's very decent, and asked us to come back again soon. we will.

next weekend was expenisive. dinner in the dove on friday. next saturday was the climate change demo, which unfortunately i slept through. samosa chat on broadway market, before i finally left for josh's birthday.. i got there at five just as everyone was leaving... it was a really posh, parent-endorsed, function, nice to see everyone but very briefly and i felt really bad that i couldn't stay, plus actually lied about 'just popping downstairs' on my way out... it was like it was asking me to be cheeky.. i walked to covent garden with adrian to meet hannah, from where we somehow got to whitechapel and went to a curry house. if i hadn't already arranged i was going to meet ian and thalia, i'd have tucked in. regardless, i had a swell hour with adrian, hannah, alex bowler+1, bertie, and jez, before walking over to brick lane for my actual dinner - i was now sordidly hungry and the side dish i'd planned on ordering would never suffice. ian could have told me he'd wrangled a free round of drinks though - does he think i drink half pints for fun? after the meal rachel turned up and we went for a drink in a very nice cinema. then we went to club motherfucker, late, but just managed to catch rhythm king and her friends' awesome set. i'd seen them on a documentary before i heard their music, which i think makes them famous in some definition. after the bands, the sound went terrible, and rachel kept threatening to leave, but i didn't care what the music was i just had to dance... eventually they fixed the sound. but we didn't stay too long anyway.

tuesday i recorded some tracks with jamie, sounded great but my playing might have been a bit iffy. i'll put them up when i get them. wednesday was the earache christmas party but i didn't go, it was free with a fiver donation to something i'd never heard of. i wasn't going to go to see four bands i didn't know on my own. thursday i met rachel in covent garden, we drank free champagne in a new beauty shop and beer in a pub and had a nice time. friday i went out to kate's birthday party which was great we danced to all sorts of decent tronicas and i made new and old friends.

yesterday we went and had broadway market curry again, then went out to buy gloves/irrk records compilations. on the way we stopped off at hackney city farm, which is quite heavenly. they have four massive pigs who's attitudes seem to be a combo of housewife and monk. donkeys and goats are affection whores. rachel decided to get a couple of gineau pigs. you know, shit like that.

so the we got to rough trade and i could have bought the organ album but didn't.

it was so cold.
we got back home and realised how foolish we'd been, underdressed and shivering and exhausted and actually verging on ill. nothing was happening so much as sitting down and watching two hours of curb your enthusiasm. then round ian ruth and katy's for hot port and mince pies. and the bit at the start of batman begins that's rubbish where he's in tibet but we didn't get past it to the actual film before we all fell asleep.

novocastria

hello,

so a few weeks ago i went to newcastle. hooray! i've not been for ages.

the occassion was the first ever ex libris records gig - catalogue number xlr001gig. andy and luke booked a couple of local bands, plus label acts bec jones and local heroes girls girls girls.

after the kerfuffle of getting up - booking tickets ages in advance, changing them, taking a couple of hours off work, and taping up copies of on benefit/aggregate on the train, i got up to newcastle with a dead phone and got lost somewhere around byker bridge. eventually - the people really _are_ friendly - i found my way to the cumberland arms. on the way a woman started talking to me, she was going there to to see one of the local bands - ohoh, i thought, that's a good sign. complete stranger asks me if i'm going to this place (down a dark steep stairway apparently, which is why she was asking... maybe not everyone's nice) and i entered.

the cumberland arms is _niiiice_. especially how they had it. fairylights, a crooked, broken tv in the corner behind the merch stand. the girls girls girls album and badges were on advance sale, as were some of my records. free sweets label samplers (mixtapes my arse) for everyone who showed up, until they ran out. then i gave them my 3-track demo to give out, but i only had three copies.

bec jones was very much better _encarne_ than i've found her demo recordings to be. charming really. she played songs that i'd all heard before, i think, and everyone shut up for them. a mate came on and played bass wind for the last three songs, with one rediculously large brass instrument after another.

girls girls girls lollopped onto stage and went down very well i think. they made a lot of fans. shame they won't be able to exploi- er, shit, i mean like follow-up but not in marketing speak. after them, the suprisingly laid-back the eye jab got up, and were very good too. four keyboards isn't very rock and roll, but they were good and proggy and tight and epic when it needed to be.

after them, shin jin rui (japanese for 'generation x', i found out, having just read that book) were punk, but it always seems a bit of an anti climax after a really rounded band. they were kind of mcluskyish, but maybe without so much humour.

then we all danced to 'sex'. i felt dirty doing it.

people wanted to go 'out'; i was lost and confused and wanted to save myself for saturday night. i could see where the midnight express to nowheresville was headed - into town then back out again. i just wanted to go home. home wasn't much rescue though, as the others arrived back and started dancing on the tables to bruce springsteen. i couldn't understand why people didn't just want to sleep. i was shown the way to the mattress in the study and fell into something like sleep.

the next day, i clearly had a cold. i've no real memory of what happened - oh the night before i had the vegetarian argument with andrew warmington out of my attorney, forcing him to admit his view that 'science is a bit like religion isn't it?'. it was all water under the bridge the day after. i went out with the girls to get breakfast, which we did very succesfully, even getting some awesome ginger beer too. the rest of the day was spent internetting as far as i can remember, then off to a nice but crowded pub to sit and shiver. bought some veg from tesco to cook for my tea - i really fancied some kind of baked aubergine/tomato/courgette thing, all to myself. instead i fell asleep on the couch and ed used them to make a thai curry for everyone which was very nice. everyone else left us to go out partying. we played a dreadful 'board' game called taboo, which we're possibly the worst people in the world to do with our pedantry and word games. and listened to yanki uxxo. and then went to bed.

sunday, rather than waiting for the train i'd booked, i took adrian's offer of his spare un-stamped ticket and just _left_. i had to go home to my flat, duvet, teddies, and girl. and i'm very glad i did. i felt better, just in time for work. emoticon. sigh.

so it could have been better, all in all. next time i'm going up is 22nd february to _play_ a _gig_. more news on that soon.

ip

the other thing in edge that irked me was the use of the phrase 'ip'. it was used probably, on average, twice an article. at least once in any feature. nowhere did it explain what it meant, though. of course, if you're in the know you know, and i know it stands for 'intellectual property'. as in, franchises and such. ususally from a game written by a small company, although a larger company owns the ip, meaning that they don't own their work, just like, hmmm, every other area of artustry (what i from now on will refer to as industries ostensibly producing art, but actually harvest the creators of the art).

like emi, here, with them's new website http://radioheadstore.com/.

here we see they are selling the 7 radiohead albums they own on different formats for different prices.

firstly they have the 7cd box set, all repackaged in digipacks. this is forty pounds. quite who would buy this, when they've had about 15 years to buy pablo honey and probably have at least some of the others, is a mystery; but people will.

then there's the download package, a snip at only five pounds less. that's insane.

then there's the whole thing on usb stick, which i can see fitting into only about 5% of usb ports due to it's awkward shape. this is eighty quid.

the whole thing is a smelly cash-in, protrayed as an official radiohead product, with their distinctive branding and iconography, and of course, their music; all of which is owned by emi. it makes me feel a bit sick.

Facebook | Six Degrees Of Separation - The Experiment

there's viral marketing, and then there's Facebook | Six Degrees Of Separation - The Experiment.

what a tosser.

LOLbour

the hype starts here:
LOLbour

new blog; the aim is weak political satire of the labour party.

Martin and me | The Guardian BAE investigation | Guardian Unlimited

Martin and me | The Guardian BAE investigation | Guardian Unlimited

*sniff*

headphones

so as our luke page (who's blog seems to have been cut off at the two-post mark sometime ago) said, he doesn't like wearing headphones any more because it's anti-social.

for a while i agreed with him. i still agree with him that it's anti-social. but after living in london for a while, i both think it's anti-social, and continue to do it. there's something about this town that encourages anti-social behaviour, even if in such a week way; you come to realise that all these people around you are just in your way. the only comment you could ever make to them is 'excuse me please'. and so i wilfully, and knowingly, wear headphones partly to cut them out.

they ask for it. there's something very depressing about being surrounded by people reading the same dreadful paper full of sleb rubbish and anti-news. someone gets up, leaves the paper, someone else sits down, picks it up. it's like my neighbours are the papers rather than the people.

that said, i wouldn't go as far as the man i saw last night. round the corner from work, there's a pub with free wifi. often i see a chap in there playing world of warcraft, or others checking their emails (it would be fun for a bunch of us to go into a wifi pub or cafe and play quake or something. sitting at different tables of course). but last night there was someone in there, (no laptop or anything, that was by-the-by), pint in front of him, headphones on, eyes closed, head down.

he was probably waiting for someone; but until then, he was obviously content to have nothing to do with anyone else at all. sat in a little warm bubble, alone. are personal stereos are the new opium?

oi

i saw this couple in a bar, disgustingly canoodling, while putting on horrendous cockney accents. i tell ya, i can't stand open displays of affectation.

from this month's edge editorial

and what happens to the games that actually succeed in selling? well, let's say you're one of the many edge readers with a wii, ps3, and 360. let's say you buy galaxy, drake's fortune, and call of duty 4. that's on top of the orange box, which you still haven't exhausted. and don't forget multiplayer halo 3, which you're been neglecting. and it's christmas, after all, so what about singstar ps3 or perhaps guitar hero 3? the cost isn't the issue - it's all about being able to give these games the time they deserve. as problems go, it's not a bad one to have. and if you find a solution, please do share it with the rest of us.

the easiest answer to the question they pose is the simple 'mu'.

but to dig deeper, that piece eats so much shit it's hard to know where to start. so you've bought a wii, a ps3, and a 360, and you've only just realised you have a finite lifespan? how long can your funds support your idiocy?

----------------
Now playing: Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - Heywood Lane
http://foxytunes.com/artist/gorky's+zygotic+mynci/track/heywood+lane

more jokes

the last post has a sort of reference/pointer problem; i can't tell the difference between a humourous event being said, and it actually happening. cue several hundred self-important words on post modernism and the reality of language.

of course, the joke is that this ambiguity between life and conversation about life (all very gofai) is often used as a crux of humour, and that's the joke.

another joke i did recently was the prison experiment, although this was instantiated as a party.

the set up was that everyone who came in was assigned either guard or prisoner, using the aperture science centrifugal decision tool - a bottle spun so as to either point to one role or another. ed and i had been down to sainsbury's and bought as many party treats as possible, in both 'basics' and taste the difference' ranges. so we had wine, vodka, orange juice, crisps, and dips, and probably more that i've forgotten, all in one flavour for prisoners and another for guards. and 60 cans of carlsberg for everyone.

one flaw that crept in, i think, was that chances of being a prisoner or a guard were even. prisoners should have outnumbered guards.

ed had printed out a whole bunch of great warning signs to put up everywhere, which worked nicely in different ways and opened avenues for conversations and fights. there was 'guards only' for the nice food, 'prisoners only' for the bad stuff, and 'human use only' for the toilet. some signs were so obvious in their message they were reverse-psychoactive - 'no spitting', 'no throwing of drinks', &c. a large 'deserters will be shot' sign was stuck above the door. then some signs were completely arbitary, the informative equivelent of white-washing coal - 'look both ways before entering the corridor' and so on. they were good.

upon deciding which of ed and i were prisoners or guards, before anyone else came, ed was imprisoned and i was a guard. i really wish that at this point, i had said 'right. no more guards' and taken the whole party under control. but to be honest, it failed to catch light. people were flaunting the rules fairly openly, and i didn't have the conscience to come down on them like they deserved that early in the evening. i did make sarah dance on her own to a song, which she really resented, so i joined in. then ed decided we should swap everyone round. i don't know why i allowed this, comning from a prisoner, but i thought it would be fun. instead, rather than making people react more strongly by giving them the opportunity for power where there was none before ('now i've got you, you son of a bitch') i think it just undermined whatever roles had been seeded and the whole thing became a bit of a prisoner-guard mish-mash. but then it was a party.

as a party it was pretty good. there were no bands playing this time, but ed and i set up a five hour set list of party music, from scott walker to mad capsule markets (i think digital hardcore is very party. others might not agree). this lasted a few hours; a large proportion of people left before midnight to get transports. a significant proportion didn't turn up, mainly due to colds. and at roughly midnight or one, everybody disappeared upstairs to the party in the same flat one floor up. then they came down and something quite remarkable happened, as the mp3 players and the internet came out, and everybodies' favourite songs came up on youtube for the dancing of. i went to bed about four, after a selection including vile pervert, born to run, girls just wanna have fun, and the phantom of the opera. you can dance to anything if you like the song.