I paid a visit to the transport museum in Covent Garden yesterday and this is what I saw:
The Metropolitan Line hasn’t changed much….
New Years resolutions:
This was taken on Friday the 20th in the circus. It was cold and wet but I was fortified by a pint of London’s finest.
Spotted on the canal last week.
I’m currently working on the next skin for this site. It will consist of slimmer style sheets (the current ones are a little too bloated) and some new colours that will make reading the entries a little easier on the eyes! And some new colours that will probably make it harder to read. Hope to have it up by Feb.
My favourite TV program at the moment? Sorious Samura’s “21st Century War” takes a look at the real victims of contemporary war. His calm, rational and yet humane narrative is both informative and moving. This man should be on our screens a hell of a lot more. Unfortunately, Channel 4 have chosen a saturday night slot for the show (I can’t imagine a much worse time). And they don’t have a page for the show on their web site. But, I have to congratulate them for the program – it’s really brilliant.
Another great day in London. Getting just a tad chilly for these south pacific bones though.
This t-shirt got me thinking about how different things could be if we all took our red pills .
This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Now I know what the Penguin gets up to at night.
We went to a great party in Brixton on Saturday to celebrate Melina’s engagement. After having a beaut dinner at Claire’s amazing house, where we got completely smashed, we were driven into Brixton by a pretty cool cabbie who cranked his stereo right up. We went to the bar, and got completely annihilated and then found ourselves on the street when the bar closed. Most people headed across the road to another place, and I went to get cash out for the cover charge. But – my bank is rubbish, and so between 2 and 4 in the morning you can’t withdraw cash from money machines. I knew about this when I opened the account, and knew that one day I would get caught out by it.
Great, stuck in south London, can’t pay the cover charge, it’s below zero (I’m wearing a t-shirt and a jacket), and we can’t find a caf? to sit in to pass the time until the cash machines will start giving me money again. We ask people, “is there a caf? around here?” Answer (from more than one person), “Mate, you don’t want to go to the cafes around here!”. Super. We are frozen. It occurs to me that we could get a bus. Tash has been saying this for a while. I accept that we are not going to be able to wait on the streets in this freezing weather and we head for the bus stop and back to central London. I never realised how warm and cosy those night buses are!
I saw “Withnail and I” yesterday. Funny as fuck. Unexpectedly camp as well. A strange thing about the film is how it feels like a kind of trip. It passes through phases. At first I didn’t see the homosexual nightmare Uncle coming. It seems as though he is a harmless and rather charming old man, but I found that I was drawn into the paranoia of the character “I†and whatever the hell he was on at that stage. I was unsure if it was paranoia that made it appear as though Uncle Monty was on the pull or if he actually was. Or was I just being naive. When it finally becomes clear that the Uncle has other intentions, the playoff between the characters seems to enter a new phase of insanity.
The crazy thing about “Withnail and I†was that it manages to capture the surreal nature and conscious experience of being out of it. Someone wrote of Seamus Heany that his writing is like consciousness itself. The blend of paranoia and lateral thinking/conversation almost convinced me that my consciousness had also been altered. I guess the viewer is the “Iâ€, hence the title of the film.
I’ve often wondered how it would be possible to express to an audience in a fictitious work (or even a documentary) an atmosphere of being under the influence of something. Is it enough to record a series of stoned episodes and then cobble them together into a drama? How does the author allow their thinking to mimic being in that state while actually being sober so they can record it? And create situations with it? Am I too repressed or self conscious to do it? Or is it because I have never tried? Probably a mix of them both.
I was also surprised to learn that Richard E Grant is apparently a teetotaler.
I went to a mate’s engagement party last night, but stopped for some chinese tucker first. The restaurant was small and very quiet, so you could hear conversations at the other tables without even trying (honest!). There were a bunch of older guys at a table near us, talking about – I still can’t get over this – how many of them had slept with a black woman! One of these turkeys went into great detail about a ‘regular’ he saw at some pub. We had a laugh about it, but one of those laughs where you’re shaking your head in disbelief at the same time. Absolutely no clue whatsoever. But I’ve encountered the same sort of losers in NZ – so it wasn’t just a case of Suits in the City, these sad people are to be found everywhere.
Anyhoo, the food was great and the party was very cool too, just a bummer that it was on a school night and we couldn’t stay longer.
And best of all, the Vanishing Point Soundtrack arrived in the post this morning. Recently re-released on CD and vinyl. Rock on. Vanishing Point is a bitchin’ film, as the reviewer at amazon put it, “art film and road movie collide”.
Today sees the addition of a new section on the bucket fountain, the ‘snaps’ link. This has actually always been in the design, I was just never happy with it so never had a link to it. Then I broke it and have only just gotten around to fixing it. The whole thing makes me think that the navigation after the home page now has to change to allow for people with lower screen resolutions. Oh well, that’s life I guess. I was actually about to start another web site, the domain name I like is still available too which is a bonus. But now I’m thinking that I should probably get on and do all the other things that I wanted to do with the bucket fountain. Hmmm.
I saw on CBS that Osama Bin Laden action figures are now available. Reminds me of the jedi Star Wars figures I loved so much as a kid. Also reminds me of a handheld computer game I saw for sale in Spain or Portugal, called “Bin Laden Vs America” which was decorated with the 9/11 tragedy. Tasteful.
Some books I’ve been reading lately:
Che Guevara’s “Motorcycle Diaries” . These are Che’s diaries detailing a bitchin’ road trip around South America with his pal Alberto. They start out on, wait for it, a 500cc Norton! When it falls apart they continue by all manner of means. It’s hard to tell how much of the book was written long after the events. Che seems like a largely normal, happy go lucky lad on an adventure at the beginning of the diaries. He ocassionally mentions revolutions, buy by the end there are a couple of passages that sound as though they were written by a far more impassioned revolutionary. Were those passages added years later? Was it because of what he saw on his travels? Or was it because he also visited Miami?
An autobiography of Che, by Andrew Sinclair , which is part of a series of ‘pocket biographies’, is a brief over view of the man. It is short and easy to digest. I recommend it to anyone who wants an introduction to the guy that so many people have posters and tattoos of.
“The Big Lie” , is an alternative and highly controversial analysis of the events at the Pentagon on the 11th of September by Thierry Meyssan. This is pretty crazy shit! His premise is that the pentagon probably wasn’t hit by a plane, due to the nature of the entrance hole and the almost complete lack of aircraft wreckage. There are a number of web sites that refute some of his theories very well, and I recommend that a thorough web search should follow reading this book. Meyssan has been called all sorts of things by people who find his theory offensive. The inconsistencies and oddities surrounding that awful day must surely make even the staunchest republican think there is more to this than we’re being told, and this is the first book I have read that has addressed some of these.
As someone who received all their information on these terrible events through a handful of TV stations and newspapers, I think that any fresh analysis is welcome.
Also popped into the Economist shop on Haymarket the other day, and bought Divided Jerusalem . I hope this will give a little more background on the region, which I have realised recently I really don’t know enough about.
