Hey all,

Hey all,

I've finally worked out an angle for the Chimaira review I have to write.

The angle will be: there is no angle. It was just a lacklustre effort by a band that should have put on a better show and not rested on their laurels.

Feeling cheerful now.

Yesterday I finished watching the Fight Club DVD that I started watching a few weeks ago while lifting weights. Now I feel all pumped up and veiny (I can hear Big Pete laughing right now : )

Last night I was bored, so I headed down to Camden and got to talking to a bloke in the Dev that did crowd control in Melbourne for ten months. He was a good chap. Later on I ran into two Slovak friends of mine and chilled with them for a bit.

Tonight I go to see Neurosis. And because of the lousy system of early curfews in London, I can't watch the season finale of Dr Who before I go (which is kinda okay, because I've managed to miss the last three episodes anyway).

My Kingdom for a Hard Disk Recorder!

Anyways, I have to either go shopping or cook some food before I set off to Kentish Town to see Neurosis. I can smell one of my flatmates cooking what smells like roast lamb down there, so it looks like shopping first.

Over and out.

-J

Hey All

News as of today:

For the last few days, on and off, I have had splitting headaches and other signs of summer colds.

Right now I seems to be okay.

Several times last weekend I managed to get myself caught in the rain, and the acidic rain of London seems to have made tiny white marks on that leather jacket of mine (either that or I have been leaning against too many chalky walls lately). This has made me feel a bit miffed... I like that jacket. Nevermind, as I keep reminding myself, it cost me all of £29, so if it makes the end of the year without falling apart I've done okay.

I suspect that getting caught in the rain repeatedly might also be related to my cold-alike feelings (especially since getting rained on was often bookended by rides on the oven-on-wheels that is the London Underground).

On the subject of rain, at about 1130 or 1200 today there was a fearsome rain storm outside my window, coupled with thunder in the distance and what might have been hail.

Two hours later, the sky is blue, the sun is shining and the clouds are somewhere over Essex.

As far as I've heard, a lot of Yorkshire is still a lake.

And they just found a car bomb in the middle of London. I should be worried, but I'm not.

Enough from me.

Over and out.

-J

I completely forgot to mention...

...that the other day I was in Fopp on Tottenham Court Road and I met Noel Fielding from The Mighty Boosh (Michael Fielding might have been with him, I wasn't sure...)

Interestingly, I met Julian Barratt at a breakcore party last year.

Those Boosh guys turn up everywhere.

Over and out.

-J

Hey All

Hey,

Saw my friends in Parkway Drive play an incredible set at the Islington Academy last night. It was so impressive that a fair few of the crowd left before the headliners, convinced that they wouldn't be able to compete. Also: a French girl told me that I bore an uncanny resemblance to a Finnish friend of hers. Second time in a year anyone has asked if I was Finnish. Weird.

Housekeeping and writing for the rest of the week. And catch up on reading, since I've had Zen (&taoMM) sitting in my satchel, being chipped at intermittently for the last two weeks.

Neurosis on Saturday. Neato!

-J

Hey All

Round-up of my weekend:

Saturday: slept off the exhausting Friday night.

Decided not to watch Dr Who, go to Earth Crisis (seminal straight-edge vegan band from the early 90s) instead.

Got caught in a Thunderstorn (!!!) at Angel Station. Rand through the rain to get to the Academy.

Earth Crisis were just as paranoid as I remember them, and the Islington Academy was only one third full, but they did put on a good show.

After Earth Crisis: ran into friends in Islington and randomly met Wayne from Static-X.

Got a bite to eat.

Slimelight.

Starbucks.

Spent most of Sunday watching DVDs of My Name Is Earl and Withnail and I on a couch at a house in Golders Green.

Made it home just in time to be running really late to go see Static-X (if I realised that I was going to be out all night, I would have taken my ticket with me).

Make it to Islington while Static-X's roadies are settting up the stage for them.

Static-X turned out to be incredible, even better than I remembered them.

Forget all their troubles, forget that they were once Nu-Metal by association (which is now slightly less fashionable than Leprosy, and rightly so), forget that their lead singer looks like a hobbit with a guitar.

They rocked like so few others can.

Also: I got talking to a security guard I saw the night before at the Earth Crisis show, and to my extreme surprise he turned out to be ridiculously smart; a sometime script editor and aspiring comics creator who could hold forth on Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, why it is good that experimental post-modern writers sometimes move into super-hero comics and the importance of divorcing yourself and your ego from your creations.

You could call him pretentious, but I tend to meet too many security guards who live up to my prejudices by not being able to spell their own names.

All good fun.

This is going to continue to be a good week for shows:

Parkway Drive and Caliban tomorrow night.

Neurosis on Saturday.

And Converge next Tuesday.

Also this week: writing, writing and more writing (plus getting a haircurt and putting out resumes).

Before I go: Warren Ellis has sent out a note saying that a coding glitch has been fixed that caused weird rendering Safari. I never noticed anything weird before, except that the body type was 48 points. At the time I assumed that it was just Post-Modern graphic design at work (the kind I was always told to do when I was studying, but I wanted to learn how to make 19th Century style woodcuts instead).

Apologies for the marathon post.

Over and out,

-J

Adventures

Exhausted, so this will be a short (and possibly not entirely coherent post):

Today I interviewed a metalcore band from America. The guys were nice, the interview went pretty well. And I even managed to arrive early.

At the wrong hotel. D'oh!

(I went to the Thistle Victoria, and I was supposed to be at the Thistle Westminster, which is about four blocks away on the same street.)

According to the publicist, this had been happening to interviewers all day, and according to the band everyone from the taxi-service up had made that mistake.

After the interview I walked from Victoria to Hyde Park to Oxford Circus, and then took the tube to Camden and then to The Harrison in Kings Cross to meet up with some friends from Australia who are in town.

That eventually led to the Crobar, where I ran into more friends, and also the two band members I interviewed.

Nightbus followed, and now I'm home and due for sleep.

Over and out.

-J

Monday Morning

Hey All,

I had an interesting weekend.

I completely failed to get another phone charger. Unless my phone is charged I can't message my parents to bring up my old charger from Elmer when they come up tomorrow after arriving there last night from Europe. Catch-22's are distressingly easy to make, but this one is easy to solve.

Weekend: The new showerhead works great, and delivers an even amount of water at a consistent temperature over an even area. Yay.

Saturday I planned my evening to include an appearance at a birthday party then a not-too-late arrival at a club in Stoke Newington. Then I took a nap and overslept by two and a half hours. FUCK!

Arrive at the party in Archway by 11. Chatted to a druid/system administrator girl from Bristol that seemed to like me. At about one I bailed on the party and spent an hour trying to get from Archway to Stoke Newington, eventually spending a tenner on a taxi.

The got into the club for free because the door staff were off duty. Saw friends, danced. After the club spent an hour or so chatting to another girl while waiting for a bus to go to Slimelight.

Spent the rest of the night wondering why the hell it is that I seem to get so incredibly gun-shy for the stupidest reasons.

My emotions are all a can of worms, and I have bigger fish to fry.

Time to turn up the gas.

Over and out.

-J

Shower Head

Did I mention that since last week the shower head has been broken off the hose in my bathroom?

It didn't make showering impossible, but it seemed to take it down to third world levels (or at least the level of civilisation where shower heads don't exist, and all washing is done with a single stream out of a chrome hose).

In any case, I finally made it to the local Homebase (about tenn minutes walk from here) to get a replacement shower head and hose (the shower head had broken leaving the thread in place) and a spanner to unscrew the hose connection at the bottom.

When I got home I discovered that the spanner was a) too small and b) the wrong type of tool for the job, so I went to Tescoes feeling slightly miffed. Halfway there, I realised that since I a) had the spanner still with the tag attached b) had the receipt and c) had bought the spanner on the incorrect advice of one of the sales assistants, I would probably be able to get it exchanged for something that would be right for the job.

Just to make sure I took some measurements of the size needed.

To cut what is becoming a long story shorter, I went back to Homewares, they refunded the cash without question, I spent ten minutes trying to figure out which tool I needed and eventually explained the situation to another shop assistant, who recommeded a thing that looked like some kind of mediaeval torture device, but he swore that it was the bes thing for the job.

So I paid for it, took it home, and after about five minutes of fiddling discovered that it was in fact the right thing, since it unscrewed the thing that had been refusing to unscrew.

From there it was a doddle to put the new fittings on.

Go me!

I've just remembered that I need to get a phone charger and pin the receipts to the notice board so that I can be reimbursed my share of the shower head/hose costs.

Ah well.

Over and out.

-J

Hey All

Hey All,

Last night the Chimaira show was good enough but not brilliant. Too many mid-tempo chugging parts, too much feeling of a band playing to the converted and not seriously going for it (fair play, they were probably still recovering from Download, but still).

Afterwards I hung with some friends that I ran into there, then I wound up crashing on their couch overnight in Mile End. Coulnd't sleep past about half five because the living room was flooded with light, so I plugged in the iPod and pulled out Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I think I wound up reading over fifty pages, and I discovered that as far as reading music goes, Miles Davis is good, the Carmina Burana by Carl Orff (all 25 parts) is good, but Enemy of the Sun by Neurosis is pretty bad (though Cleanse and Cleanse II are actually okay-ish for reading, because it is all one continuous drum jam).

After my friends got up I chilled with them for a while, then got on the 25 to Stratford, and took the tube home.

Rest of the day was spent checking messages and writing up notes.

The shower head in the bathroom is broken (at the head end of the hose), so tomorrow I need to go to homewares to see if I can find some kind of shower head thingo and the right tool to unscrew the hose.

Fun fun.

Over and out.

-J

Hey Everyone

Hey All,

Litght on posting last week because I spent Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday either going to, coming from or hanging out at the family house in Elmer. Other adventures include raiding the Bognor Regis Second Hand Bookshop (found The Postman by David Brin and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by someone or other), finishing A Scanner Darkly, sitting up late working on writing and oversleeping the next day, one of my uncles calling me 'Well Fed' (yep, I guess I need to lose some weight) etc.

Not much exciting to report in the Friday Department.

Saturday I headed to Bethnal Green to catch a new wave/electro/synthpop oriented clubnight that some friends were organising. A pretty good night, even though the venue lacked the dark corners needed to allow you to sink out of sight when you need to. It ran until about two or three AM.

After that a friend invited a posse back to his flat in Stoke Newington (I think). Chilled out there the with friends and friends of friends. Listened to music I either haven't heard for years or have never heard full stop.

Somewhere around about early afternoon everyone left at the after party headed out to something called Stoke-fest.

I expected it to be a couple of punks in a pub, but it turned out to be a massive festival thing taking over a huge park in Stoke Newington. I broke off from the group to go exploring, saw a tissus performance, went looking for food, decided that food was too expensive, too dodgy and the queues were too long, ate a good chicken sandwich at a nice little cafe and found some of the original friends chilling on the grass in a different section. Somewhere along the way I saw an excellent hard-funk outfit called Size Nine (www.myspace.com/sizenine) play a couple of songs in a tent. I think they are worth investigating further.

All good.

Eventually I made it home, where I slept for about fifteen hours.

Today: Thee Ed messaged to tell me to cover Chimaira tomorrow. Went to Borders to buy some magazines, bought the Chimaira album at HMV and stopped by Tesco on the way home.

Bedtime again.

Over and out.

-J

Reading:

After some marathon reading, I just finished Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor (if I was typing this in Safari, I'd use the HTML codes for Bold on Chuck Palahniuk and Italics of Surivor... maybe I'll do that later).

And it was pretty damn good.

But more importantly, it means that I'm one book closer to my target (I think this brings the count to 10). And I read it in just under a week, so it makes for a good pace.

As far as the book goes, it's a fierce critique of religion, celebrity, class, media and the like, all wrapped up in a blanket of corruption and amorality.

Question arises again: what to read next?

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick? Perdido St Station? About a Boy by Nick Hornby? Invisible Monsters by Chuck P?

Decisions Decisions.

I'll figure it out later.

Over and out.

-J

Update:

Saturdary Night was good enough.

I managed to make it to Electrowerks by midnight, and did the interview with the two performer/producers backstage (the backstage area at Electrowerks used to be a corner next to the stage/dj stand with a couch where people would routinely pass out around four AM).

The interview went well enough.

Tuesday my parents are visiting from Australia (cue a few days out of town at my grandmother's house), so I have to make sure that everything is in order at this end before I go (and figure out what I need to take with me so that I can do any work I need to do down in Elmer).

Also:

The more I read Survivor by Chuck Palanhiuk, the more I like it. Although reading anything by Chuck P is a weird experience, because for some reason when I read something by some authors, pretentious as it sounds I start to think in the rhythms of their writing.

When I get down to Elmer I'm going to raid the second hand bookshop that I always visit, and try to find as many books I want to read as possible. Mental note: make a list of what to look for.

Anyways, enough from me for the time being. Reading to do.

Over and out.

-J

News:

Here's an update from my end:

In the last few days I've been busy writing stuff. And following up organising bits and pieces, and the like.

Tonight I am going to be interviewing two performers for one website and reviewing their show for another.

Apart from that I've also been reading more of Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk. Which is shaping up to be pretty good.

Also: I have been listening to the new Neurosis album, which is an interesting work of art. Mental note: get tickets for their next show at the Forum sometime, these things always seem to sell out pretty damn quickly.

Wednesday Night I nearly went to see Gogol Bordello, but at the last minute I decided I would wait until they came back to London, since seeing them Wednesday would have necessitated paying street-tout prices (lack of planning, my bad).

Anyways, adventures coming tonight and prep to do in the meantime.

Over and out.

-J