Show last night:

Last night I went out to see Octavia Sperati, To-Mera and Adastreia play at the Underworld.

Adastreia suffered from technical problems, and once they got under way the intricate keyboard parts got lost in the mix. They still sounded pleasantly heavy. I'd like to see them with a tougher style of vocals, though.

Next up , Norway's Octavia Sperati. It was the first time I've seen them, and they were pretty damn impressive. What is it about Scandinavians that they have such a good understanding of the Grammar of Rock. They know how to dominate a stage and create a huge racket without even breaking a sweat. Highly recommended to anyone who likes Doom or the like.

Finally To-Mera: Last time I saw them (six months ago? Nine months ago? I can't remember) they seemed a little shaky, but I predicted that once they hit their straps they would be apocalyptic. Goddamn was I right. Absolutely amazing, note-perfect and brilliant stage presence. Even had a brutal mosh-pit going, which is surprising considering the proggy-ness of their material. Top flight musicians with a good sense of humour, demonstrated by a five minute jazz jam featuring a guest soprano saxophonist. Jazz-Core lives!

Today: writing and stuff.

Over and out.

-J

Busy!

Hey All,

The weather in London has changed from HOT! on Wednesday and Thursday last week back to cold and miserable this Bank Holiday Weekend. So much so that as I kicked about with friends Sunday Morning after Slimelight, I was thinking that choosing my new jacket over my two-jacket standard wasn't such a great decision.

Second guessing London Weather is fraught with peril.

I am currently busy as all hell right now, with writing things coming in and going out in all directions. Met a girl at the Scare show last week who gave me some useful tips. Ditto some from a friend of mine at Slimes on Saturday Night.

Reading: Finished Fight Club on Saturday (or was it Friday?), started reading the copy of Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny that I found in that Oxfam shop two weeks ago. Finished it last night. It was pulpy and silly, but it still counts towards my fifty.

Have started reading Survivor by Chuck Pahlinuk, the book he wrote after Fight Club.

I have Perdido Street Station by China Mievelle winking at me from the shelf, but it is a hefty tome and I want to chow down some more even sized books before attacking that one. Who knows, it could read like Harry Potter, but I'm not going to risk it just yet.

Speaking of Harry Potter, they are already taking Pre-Orders for the new one now. Very tempting. Logical even. Nevermind, I've got 'til mid July to take care of that.

Anyways, enough gabbing from me, back to something constructive.

Over and out.

-J

reading stuff...

I just finished re-reading Fight Club.

Funnily enough, I noticed a whole lot of stuff I didn't notice the first time around. Or maybe I just don't remember noticing it. I remember I read it not too long after I saw the movie, and the movie came out at the tail end of 99, from memory.

I'm also chipping through Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin, but the binding on that book is a little flaky, so it can't really be my tube book.

Some of you might remember that I set out to read 50 books this year? I think I'm about ten books off schedule, but I haven't sat down to calculate.

Hmm:

Checking on my bookshelves, I've read

Clockwork Orange
Last Exit to Brooklyn
Catcher in the Rye
The Knight of Swords
The Queen of Swords
The King of Swords
Fight Club

Bugger. That's only seven books, unless there is one or two that I have forgotten (I'm sure there must be one).

Nevermind. Will read more.

Over and out.

-J

Hella Busy

For once I have a decent excuse for sporadic posting: I have been hella busy this week.

backtracking: Tuesday I was back and forth with Myspace, LJ and Email to organise press passes for shows to review and interivews with travelling musicians. Went to Camden to double check the availability of the Devonshire Arms for Mid-Afternnon interview purposes. Also stumble on a Vintage Clothing shop hidden in the Camden Lock and found leather jacket that I like for the pretty reasonable price of £29. It's sort of a slightly longer blazer style, and I have been looking for another leather jack for eighteen months give or take. Bear in mind sometimes I have to be held at gunpoint before I will buy new clothes.

Wednesday I had to write questions for the interview I was doing at 1400 at the Devonshire Arms with said travelling musicians, before heading over with my notepad and tape recorder.

The interview actually went pretty damn well. The nightmare situation for an interviewer is when the subject refuseds to talk. The band that I interviewed happily waxed loquacious with vey little prompting from me, leaving me wishing that I had brought more tape.

After the interview I took a look through Camden, took the tube to Oxford Street, bought a Kerrang and then headed back to Camden to see the Scare play at The Barfly. The support band Ox.eagle.lion.man were surprisingly good for a London band (bands in London seem to start on the basis of who looks good with what haircut and if they own the right jeans and shoes (I know, I know, pot calling kettle black). I can't explain why OELM were good, and maybe that is why I like them.

And naturally The Scare were wonderfully debauched.

Thursday: Spent the afternoon housekeeping, exercising and grooming. Thursday night went to see Pirates of the Caribbean with some friends. Pirates was damn near insane, but the dialogue was superb. Jack Sparrow's dialogue, anyway. I'm pretty sure that I can see it being quoted in the street by exhuberant teenagers for years to come, much like The Princess Bride or the Original Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And the production design was incredible. Destined to be a cult classic if it wasn't already a blockbuster.

Today: finished a review and sent it off. On a roll, so I'm thinking I'll tackle some other reviews that I have to do.

No hard and fast plans for the next few days. I'm going to play it by ear.

Over and out.

-J

Hey All

Update:

The band interview today went pretty well. Will have to write up my notes/transcribe the tape while it is all still fresh tomorrow.

Passes to review a show on June 2 are pretty much sorted.

Saw the Scare play at the Barfly in the evening and was blown away by the support. And the Scare.

Right now: tired.

Going to pull clothes out of the washer and catch some Z's.

Over and out.

-J

Hey All

Hey,

Tomorrow I have:

- emails to send
- interview locations to arrange
- questions to compose
- reviews to edit
- show passes to confirm
- guestlists to blag
- comics to read

And somewhere between all of that I need to buy food and take care of minor housekeeping.

All good.

Over and out.

-J

Hey All

Saturday Night I decided not to go out dancing, since I was already feeling kinda tired at about 10.

After repeatedly nodding off while watching The Boys From Brazil, I was pretty sure that I had made the right decision.

Woke up early in the morning, and was treated to the strange experience of being awake on a Sunday Morning without that weird, semi-disassociatiated feeling of sleep deprivation. Sophie Ellis-Bextor was a guest on some Sunday Morning Cooking/Chat show, which was weird given how SEB looks these days.

I wound up dusting the living room, tidying up some stuff that had been sitting around for months and the like.

Later on I sent and received confirmed Emails for the interview that I am doing later this week.

I think I wound up nodding off again early. No Grey's Anatomy for me then. I'll catch a repeat/buy the DVD/Download the series when I get my limit upped/not bother depending on time/resources/interest/whether I can be bothered.

Woke up early this morning, and I'm figuring out what needs to be done today.

Feeling good because I've sorted the magazines on my bed into piles, to be sorted out.

I have a pile of stuff in the middle of my room which is going to be relocated to one of my wall cupboards sometimes soon.

But before that I will probably defrag my wall cupboards (Which might involve moving stuff out of the way... it never ends).

I will know that I have arrived when I can afford to move into a sprawling, open plan loft, with enough space that even I will have trouble cluttering it.

In the meantime, work to do.

Over and out.

-J

Hey All

Hey All,

I didn't wind up going out last night, even though there were at least three things I could have gone to.

I just felt tired. I passed out at about seven, woke up at three, fell asleep again at five and woke up at 10.

It's always been a little weird the way I sleep. Sometimes I've survived whole weeks on four hours a night. Sometimes I can't have less than nine.

And sleeping for fifteen hours straight doesn't even make the front page anymore.

At least one girlfriend has complained that the way I sleep can't be normal.

Granted the hours I keep, the circles I move in and my ability to ignore biological signals if I'm on a roll with something (with a book or a movie or the like) doesn't help, but still...

Anyways, I digress.

Right now I have finished writin up the festival that I went to a few weeks ago, and I'm currently paring it down to a manageable length (which means that at current length, two fifths are going to go: Nurse! Hand me that chainsaw!).

Other news:

I am thinking of buying one of the reasonably priced printer/scanner/copier things I saw at the mac-shop, if only because going down to the net cafe to print job applications and CV is getting to be a real See You Next Tuesday. Besides which, down there they can't scan for bobbins, and a constant stream of other customers can spin an otherwise simple task out for twenty or thirty minutes.

It's not a critical piece of hardware, but it would help, so I'm going to set aside some cash and pick their brains on Regent Street sometime soon (I'm wondering if having an ozone-generating device in my bedroom would be deletarious to my health, but it does occur that if I concerned about that, I could try the radical idea of OPENING A WINDOW).

Not sure what my plans are tonight. I'm going to try to get as much writing done today as I can.

Next week I might be interviewing an Australian band that are stopping off in London before the head to Leipzig to play at Wave Gothic Treffen (German Goth festival that happens every year, where something like 20,000 plus goths take over a town in Saxony).

And with that, I should probably get back to the editing.

Over and out,

-J

New Art

Hey All,

I've been messing around artistically again.

A couple of weeks ago I made a sacred heart design in Freehand, which I fixed up this morning (it looked kinda wonky).



And I wasn't terribly happy with the way that it came out, so I went into photoshop and tried to run some filters to make it look a little less wrong-resolution.

And I stumbled on a bunch of filters.

Normally I don't touch filters, because they have a way of taking over your art without adding anything good. But I did like the half-tone effect:



After that I messed with the colours to get that effect.

Not bad, I reckon.

Anyways, today there is more writing in store for me.

Over and out.

-J

Hey All

So far this week I have been writing and reading and stuff.

Tonight I saw Sunshine, the SF movie with Cillian Murphy in it.

Very dark.

Right now I am trying to find my phone charger.

Must keep looking.

Over and out.

-J

Weird.

Two weeks ago I was listening to a professional photo re-toucher talk about the photoshop effects they use to change the body type of actresses (for the record, it was Liquidize).

He mentioned that while most of the time he is istructed to make the models thinner, when it comes to Victoria Beckham, he is isntructed to make her look fatter. Or at least not so skeletal.

Skip forward two weeks. I step off the tube at Leytonstone Station, look a the newstand and see that one of the Celebrity Gossip Rags is running a headline 'Victoria Gains Weight!', with accompanying photos.

Hmm.

Over and out.

-J

Hey All,

Hey All,

Here's that picture of my new satchel that I promised.

The shot was originally really glare-y because the light in my room is a nightmare, so I messed around with the burn function in potatoshop.



Like I said, I think it looks pretty boss, and it is an improvement over my old satchel, which is evermore beat-up.

Just over the camera left shoulder, you can see a little of my new bookshelf, complete with some of the magazines that were previously taking up half of my desk.

I am going to try to get into the habit of posting more pictures, since I'm starting to get the hang of uploading, hosting and linking etc.

(Gus: do you know a way of hotlinking photos from Flickr? I've got that shot sitting in my Photobucket space.)

Over and out,

-J

Hey All

Here's some more news:

Satuday night I did wind up going out, after finishing and uploading the review that I was writing.

Though it did take me a stupid amount of time to reach Angel, since I initially spent half an hour waiting for the N8 to take me to Walthamstow (with a view to taking the N38 to Angel), only to discover that the N8 actually terminates somewhere in Essex, nowhere near where I wanted to be.

So I took another N8 to Bank, and because of some strange late night roadwork near Liverpool Street Station the bus took a strange detour through some semi-desolate parts of the East End (one of those parts of London where boarded up, burnt out fascades stand right next to swanky shops and nightclubs, and the ominous tower blocks cast shadows over all).

Next was the wait for the N43 to take me to Angel, which I spent reading King of Swords by Michael Moorcock and shooting the breeze with some clubbers who were nearby.

Eventually I made it to Angel. Neato.

Sunday I decided that I wanted to see the new Spiderman movie, so I killed time until about 11 walking from Marble Arch to Leicester Square (by my calculations, roughly two and a half hours... I'm still not sure what could have taken me that long, detours through fitzrovia notwithstanding).

And I saw Spiderman 3 on a nice big screen. Which I actually enjoyed, though I will understand why some people hate the movie.

After the movie I tried to chill out in Soho Square, but the stinging haze off pollen from Sweet Chestnut-Trees (or something) got in my eyes.

Eventually I made it home, just in time to miss Tesco closing. Rats.

Room cleaning continues apace, as does writing etc.

No other news to report for the time being.

Will keep you all posted.

Over and out.

-J

News:

The bookcase is assembled, and scarily enough it is alread full of the books that didn't fit on my other bookcase.

I week or two ago a friend of mine was writing about her dream house, and one of the things she wanted was long hallways lined with bookshelves. I think I know what she means, since I get the feeling that if I am not stopped I might wind up covering ever foot of spare wall space with bookcases.

In any case the bookcase has given me an excuse to clear a whole pile of crap off my desk, which makes me feel like I can breathe again, not needing to go to either a library or a pub to find a clear, flat surface. Naturally clearing up the desk a little bit triggers a spurt of compulsive spring cleaning, but that is long over due in my corner.

Other news: so far I think that I have forgotten to mention that I bought myself a new satchel last week, to replace the WH Smith one that is falling into extreme disrepair. This new one is Portrait rather than Landscape, it has a ginchy clasp on the front and a neato side pocket that I can stuff a rolled up newspaper into when I'm not reading it (the London Paper or the London Lite fits nicely - the bonus of that is that I now have a rolled up newspaper wherever I go so that if anyone tries to mug me (knocks on wood) I can slap them with it and then be halfway down the street before they've realised what has happened).

I will try to take a picture of it soon enough so that you can all stop and admire.

In another window I am finishing off a review, I just ducked over to here to clear my head before I proofread it and send it off. I haven't decided whether I am going out tonight, but I suspect that there will be busrides if I do (come to think of it, with the Bank Branch Northern Line out again, there would have been busrides in any case).

Also: last night I bought one of those cheap pinstripe suits from Tesco (for £45), on the rationale that I need a suit that I'm not afraid to wear for fear of getting dust on it, and at the other extreme I need one that doesn't smell of Moth Balls and Charity Shop.

Watched a little of Road To Perdition before, and couldn't help imagining how each shot would have looked in the original graphic novel. I've never read it, maybe I should try to find it in one of the libraries.

Anyways, enough gabbing from me, time to proofread.

Over and out.

-J

Deliver me from Swedish funiture!

Because all of my desk and half of my bed are covered in books and magazines, I decided to buy another bookshelf from Ikea last Friday.

Today I figured that it was time to put it up.

Unfortunately, once I had cleared space and spread all the parts out on the floor of my room, I was reminded that they no longer supply allen keys in packaging, and I can't for the life of me find mine (even though I always buy allen keys three at a time, because I know that I will always lose one.

So mood now = 'Lord, why dost thou mock me?'

(That and 'I wonder if they sell allen keys at Tesco').

-J

Update:

I schlepped down to Tesco and back, picking up a set of allen keys of various sizes for just under £2. Then I watched some classic Star Trek on BBC2 (strange how they didn't do that many episodes, yet I keep seeing ones I've never seen before).

When my attentions finally turned back to assembling the bookshelves, I discovered that there was in fact an allen key included, it was just cleverly camoflaged in with the pegs, bolts, nails and the other crap that they ship bookcases with (razzin' frazzin'...)

In any case, I've pretty much assembled the bookcase now, all that remains is nailing the backing to the back, which I think I will do when I'm less likely to wake people up doing it.

Over and out.

-J

Seeing the Melvins:

Tonight I'm seeing the Melvins at the Islington Academy.

That should be pretty fuckin' sweet.

Other than that I've been given myself lessons in getting stuff done no-matter what.

Over and out.

-J