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.
Had some folk over on Saturday afternoon for drinks. The plan was to have a few drinks and then head out clubbin’ or some such. But no, at 5am on Sunday we were still there. I think I’m still slightly toasted, but starting to get my head together. A good time was had by all, although the red wine stains on the carpet are going to come back and bite us on the arse when it’s time to get the bond back. House smells of smoke. And why do I always talk shit for hours on end when I’m partying? And why are the neighbours dissing us?
Steve leaves today for S.A for the summer. He will be missed by all.
This dude lives around the corner apparently. I’d never heard of him until his house was pointed out to me. When I then saw him on the box I was a little dissappointed.
So what am I listening too? London radio is generally bollocks, so I have settled on the BBC World Service. It reminds me of good ol’ National Radio back home. A station from home that I do miss is Active, still the best radio station I’ve ever tuned into. To listen to it in London I had to download RealPlayer which fucked up Mozilla. So after a hefty download I had to uninstall RealPlayer. Mozilla is working perfectly again, but alas, no Radio Active.
Just saw an Active album at SmokeCDs which I may purchase along with a few others. Why pay ?14 for a CD when you can get it from NZ and pay about ?8? Whooo hoooo!
alright – here we are, Tuesday night, sitting around at the flat. “Star Wars” Episode I is on the telly. So why is the telly on mute and the stereo cranked right up? Simple. “The Phantom Menace” SUCKS. Oh yes. We all know that. What happened to the most significant cultural reference point of my generation? How did the princess become a toad? The story is crap, I’ve seen better Flash animations, and as for the pony tails….
One thing that really pumps in the real trilogy is how cool the bad guys are. The bad guys here are rubbish. How do you respect a Jedi that canes some very stupid robotic animations? Ok, the stormtroopers were no Einstein or Yoda for brains, but they looked good. It gave them credibility. That counts for something when you’re a five year old. That kind impression stays with you.
The other thing that pumps in the real films is the chemistry between all the characters. The goodies are a fab gang. There is even a chemistry between the baddies. Like when Vader chokes Admiral Motti in the Death Star board room:
“Enough of this. Vadar, release him!”
“As you wish.”
Now that is cool.
Oh great, Jah Jah Binks has just turned up. The TV is about to go OFF. Oh George , why have you forsaken me?
Today I purchased a digital camera. It further marks my descent into complete dependency on my laptop and electronic gadgets. The camera is a lovely Canon PowerShot A40 . It is neat. I nearly bought a Ricoh Caplio RR30 . The Ricoh had higher resolution and some other cool features for the price, but given the deal I got from the nice folk at Jessops after showing them the deal that is available on Amazon.com, I settled for the Canon with its more realistic colour. Actually, the guy at Jessops was NOT a happy chappy. The Amazon deal was so good I saved about ?120 on what I would have had to have paid at Jessops. Party on.
Speaking of Party On, I watched the Waynes World movies at the weekend. Waynes World II gets my award for “One of the best sequences in a motion picture” with the spoof of “The Graduate” near the end of the film. It is soooo well done and the appearance from Charlton Heston is suburb. I was pretty smashed though so that could have something to do with it.
Went to see Michael Moore the other night. A great show, part stand-up comedy, part rant, part game show. He also got extremely pissed about particular attitudes within the crowd (I think that’s what it was about).
National Novel Writing month (NaNoWriMo) is coming to a close, and I’m hoping to get to my 50,000 word quota finished tomorrow. It is really a sketch of a novel, which needs the details and definition added later. It continues to develop as I write. Sci-Fi has few limits in terms of the setting of a story or the toys that characters can play with. The latest is a super mega-mega yacht. Yeh yeh!