camera obscura footage

so, not only did I take and upload my first real you tube footage, I have also posted it here!
So this is their second to last song, we got a good position on the balcony, and the sound comes out all right here. The main bug bear for me however, is that the venue Koko;- a beautiful old theatre, with great sound and a giant mirrorball, charges £3.70 for a 440ml can of coke. so four cans of beer costs you £15.80! I am pretty sure that is disgusting. So the next gig I go to there (cold war kids 23rd May) I am going to sneak liquor in- so there you bastards!!

Springtime fluctuates in with warmth and sunshine, hides out behind some clouds for a time then pops back with heat. Blossom trees in full swing, I am really liking the white ones at the moment.
Tonight we go to Camera Obscura a Glasgow band with fun and tender sounds. L. got me tx for my bday which start off quite a gig crammed season. I am biking to work currently -oh have been offered the job as well000 havent taken it yet000

Making compliation discs is still going strong if you want one?!

Special Day -1

So I brought that video camera, so take it back if you have already got it for me, its fine. Still need a tripod. I havent taken a single frame of footage though! But its not been the right time. Tonight might be the right time, as its my (ahem) special day minus one oh yeah, OH YEAH! oh yeah.

Its going to be a good one. Poor L. is sick though, but she, like the kids in shameless, knows how to throw a parrrrrrrty.

So its the big day tomorrow, am off to the swimmers pub, its on Eburne road if you are keen, should be good!

So day off tomorrow (sharp mathmaticians among you will know that is my special day -0) I have a few things i want to do, taping the whole day is one of those things. from the moment I wake up! should be REALLY INTERESTING if you have a yearning to see everything I do. but if you cant do something self centered on yr own birthday there is no time to do it.

But on a side note, I saw a guy this morning talking about the gorrilas in the london zoo, (who this week has been placed in a new enclosure) and he is saying with the money that they used for this half acre section (£5,000,000) they could use that to support the animals on the front line (congo). But what I took from it is a sense that I have nothing I am passionate about, (music arsenal, making movies, watching movies, these things dont count? these things dont count.

So 2007, time to get involved, 32? Time to get passionate about something that has nothing to do with myself.
options- Amnesty international? save the countain lions? BADGERS!!!

not a bad option...

Wishlist

OK, so if I ran into some money all of a sudden, these are the things I might buy.

Drums
Video CameraExternal Hardrive
dvd recorder
suit
sunglasses
ps3

Not too much is it? no I dont think it is. hahahahaha.
anyway, now to look for that money!

date night

Didnt do that well or that bad in the quiz last night. As usual I can only remember the questions I got right
1)What religion does the idea of ying and yang belong?
2)What religion are hare krishnas?

It was a religion round.

Drunk too much though. Sore head now. and its the afternoon!

Looking for a venue for my birthday. its difficult, I am thinking of a meal (its on a friday) I have bought the time out book. here are the two that it might be at

Green And Black and The Charles Lamb

Both look good on the net, I might go have a look this weekend.

Didnt win on the horses today, dispite being given a definite thing.

quiztina turner.

ten minutes left of my most boring day in this new job. BAH! Ten lengthy insipid minutes.

anyhow its quiz night tonight. and we have no name as yet. how hard is it to come up with a witty, brillant, topical, relevant name? hard. thats how, its hard hard.

heres the best so far,
scooby dooby dont
we're with matt dillon.
sex golf and rock and roll.

Even asked yahoo answers, the best they came up with was norfolk & chance, which while quite funny, every quizmaster must have heard that one.

Its our second time we have gone and we were mid table mediocre at the last time, tonight? possibly worse.

will let you know tomorrow, along with the rating of the hangover.

Oh arsenal play tonight, which as luck would have it they did the night we played quiz last. its not on tv so I am not being unlucky, in fact I bet on us winning, (2-1 rosicky last goal, and 2-0 fabregas first goal)

So Lily Allen was awesome. I had seen a gig on tv of her, she seemed out of breath and uncomfortable, but she has been training at being a star and was a great act.

Early signs were bad, a huge queue was bypassed for the pub and when I got to the merchandise desks there were two chicks, they must have been 14 at the very oldest but since I am old, they looked about 9 to me. So they were buying these t shirts, and I was laughing, they evoked a lot of thoughts which I shall regail you with now.
1) is that the age of people they are aiming at with these shirts, they fitted perfectly! they are 9! (or 14!) 2) if this is the age that you are aiming to sell yr goods to, why arent they child prices? 15-18 pounds for a childs tee shirt!! 3) what are you doing leting them try on the tshirts??
I bought a bag of badges. haha, the kids have the money thats for sure.

She started with LDN, with her white sneaker dancing and reggae horn section. I got into it quite quickly, feeling out of place sitting upstairs by myself (L, T & C were downstairs but no one sitting by me did!). So there were loads of young kids with their mums, single older women (they asked me for a hit of the doobie which I was trying to be low key about). The high point was a cover of "Heart of Glass" Which was one of those musical moments when nothing else mattered. awesome.
(photos to come when I can get them off my phone)

gigs again!

Top of the day to you!
I saw a band called hush the many last week. didnt really want to go, but L talked me into it and (albeit the only gig I have been to all year) it was the best gig all year! amazing. slightly samey with a quiet begining turned riotous vaugeness at the end but a lovely tangible feeling about it. I pitied the next band whom while good at their teenage angst stuff, (a band who obviously use the mirror in band practice and see the dublin castle as a stadium) it only held me for a few minutes and they were slightly embarrased ones.


And tonight we are going to see Lily Allen, again an L's choice, so she is really showing me the town!! a great start to the week I do believe!


And looking forward to st pattys day this sat, my work is going tomake green food and I have a chance to break out my kermit top!

Mix Tapes

Mix tapes.

I think we need to get this back into action. After making a couple for xmas and parties etc, (with mixed results) I think I am going to get on top of it and make some for everyone. You want one? Just ask.

I think I shall have my own template on how to make them. It will be as if it’s a tape, and the first side should be the party side. This could be heavy if the recipient enjoys heavy, or party if they don’t really dig heavy. Then the second side is more of the Sunday feet up in front of the papers kind of way. The Sunday of your student days; a Sunday that really matters. Not just the desperate Sunday that you cling to in dread of the Monday lurking in the recesses of yr mind but a real life Sunday when nothing else matters, and its all comfy couches and cappuccinos (which you could grab a bloody mary if you so desired).

The New Year Team

This is the people who began the last night of 2006 with us.

Killed a tree for Jesus,

Yo, so here is team xmas at seven sisters dot com dot com dot


hope you are cool tonight

friday night is the tip of the weekends iceberg

I am hungover. thats just how it is. its half past five and I should have kicked it. anyway chelsea vs arsenal this weekend. a very young arsenal! big game, big game team. bring it on sky commintators!

nothing to write today but this photo is on my december callendar and quite thought provoking.

anniversary

6 years and two days ago I arrived in london!! yay! here I am still!



so heres to London!

off to work party tonight, will try and take photos for tomorrow.

that will be exciting for you.

Best damn freakout hotel room EVeR!

I love it! Imagine it, you would be in a real live cartoon! Constantly being ware of falling anvils, black holes "painted" on the ground and acme dynamite disasters.

1st of December Motherfuckers

Well it’s Friday, and that’s something to be thankful for.
West London has overbearing grey skies, and metcheck says its going to rain all weekend. Bring it on I say.
This weekend looks to be a nice one, there is the football tomorrow, and I am also going to check out my mates band Regis Low which will be good. Its nice and early for a change so you can get out and do other stuff if you want. Also its in Camden so there should be a chance to get a couple of things for Xmas. And Sunday I think we might get all homely. We have a million of things to do, my list goes like this
1) Chores
2) Make Christmas Cards call people for addresses
3) Make plum chutney
4) Play video game (Civilisation 3 (iv is downloading))
5) Fix mistakes made in video
6) Fix record players mixer
7) Transfer summer clothes to seasonal bag.
That’s pretty interesting no? something to subscribe to someone’s blog for? Haha.

And a quick word about the Football.
After a dark week for arsenal fans is a tense and action packed week ahead. I have heard them say there are no more important games than your next one, and Arsenals nest one is very important. But then porto and chelsea within 7 days, you might think the boss has a point about the fixture farce.
But we MUST beat spurs at home, this team knows it needs to and I am sure they will, even though it looks like Henry may miss the game. Even though we couldnt beat Fullham, tomorrow is a must see day.

SO if you are down at the big read tomorrow, I will see u there, I should be up front. will try to get photos of the weekend!

Merry Memories

One million shopping days until Christmas!
Oh no!
Ten thousand shagging seconds before conception.
Oh no!
Thirty three godzillion breaths before expiration.
Err, I’ll stop now.

Also twenty minutes until work starts and I’m here. Don’t ask me why, oh no, don’t get me started, have been here a good 50 minutes of worthless work. No one to impress, just sitting around doing work, so I thought- haven’t blogged in a while lets hit that. But I don’t have much positive to bring at the moment, unless you count that its Thursday, that it’s a beautiful blue sky outside with some faint yellow washing my screen. But that’s by the by, it’s the last day of the month before December.

And speaking of presents, I am thinking of having a little suggestion series on things you might be able to get that special someone in your life. Starting with this little wonder…

a nothing day

"I have nothing to say, I am saying it and that is poetry" -John Cage

Not the alley mcbeil character either! and here is a video showing his famous 4'33" at the Barbican Hall.

It sums up my day, but hopefully not my night.

Guilty, of love in the first degree

The spiral staircase in the tube platform was full to bursting point. The crowd was an uncomfortable mixture of home and away football fans and commuters. Tension was growing faster than people were moving. Not that he seemed to mind, his white ipod earphones were working overtime, his music spilling into the staircase, hustling for room.
She turns to her mate, incredulous. “Guilty” she says eyebrows arched high, “its guilty by bananarama innit?” Her friend nods wearily, “I never heard a bloke listening to Bananarama before unless he is gay, which he must be”. He trundled off seemingly unaware.
I didn’t listen to the rest of their social commentary, I was busy seething at L’s ability to blog straight from her phone.
PROJECT UPDATE
Wahoo for me! I have finished the dvd for the nephew and its sitting right here beside me. I need to make a cover for it now in between my work (you will be happy to know tg). But I don’t know what really to put on it as all the photos have been used already in the dvd!
I will post it here of course when I am finished so don’t worry your cute little face about it.
FOOTBALL
A tense game last night had Arsenal pick the first ball out of the net from a superb strike from Van Da Vaart, whom I wish I didn’t name check yesterday. Arsenal were watching him at the start of the season though and perhaps he will follow Rosicky in scoring well against arsenal in the CL and then signing… After that things weren’t working for us, they were stealing our balls, Clichy and Eboue crosses became messier, the tempo dragged, and the commentators picked up the same old lines “this is becoming all too familiar” etc.

Senderos seemed awesome for some of those stops, coming right up field to snuff out danger in the midfield. Flamini did well as well. And Hleb was on fire, his footwork’s superb, but we lacked that last touch as the commentators couldn’t stop themselves from reminding us. But the half time quiet speculation seemed to do the trick and we stormed out. Fabregas turned with sublime grace to deftly weight a ball to Van Persie and in it went. Thank god!
But while 1 1 was looking like a result, and me thinking that the german league must be quite good if they are on the bottom of it we scored again.(less than 10 mins from time!) I think Eboue was as sick of his dodgy crosses (he did some awesome ones at the start of the game though) as I was and thought fuck it- I’m going for it. Blasted through the keeper it was the luck we needed.

But of course it wasn’t just luck, we had changed from dogged 4 5 1 to menacing 4 4 2, freeing up Henry at last from always having 3 defenders on his back, giving more room to VP to distract them and with such attacking fullbacks you felt that it had to happen. Only you knew the last few months would be playing on the players minds.

On came Theo Walcott, which was great not just to shut the commentators up about the lack of English feet on the grass, but also because his pace on the wing and (selfless) pinpoint cross allowed Baptista his first Arsenal goal. Go the Beast! So 3 1 van de vaart first goal was worth a sweet 80-1 at betfred.
ART
And since I know not everyone cares about the football, here is a piece of stopmotion animation that makes me wish I had a digital video camera, a white board, more time and a time machine so I could steal this idea without being too obvious. Are you meant to reference you tube? if you want to know who the music etc is you have to click through- sorry!

Four tall beers later

My head aches.
I looked up from my book to see a brilliant blue sky, autumnal leaves of bright yellow were swaying slightly. Pretty, but it hurt my eyes.
I will try to drink two litres of water today. Its 2 minutes past nine and I already want to go home. Oh well, must sharpen up and get to work.
Well a few minutes on this blog won’t be too naughty and might even help me get my thoughts together.

Went out last night, saw Herman Dune.
Had a beer at the Ten Bells which was a smoky dingy affair.
>Also its where Jack the Ripper was meant to drink, and at least two of the girls he murdered drunk there regular like. There are lots of guided walks that you can do that show you the alleys the bodies were found in. Did you hear they have made a computer composite of his face?
Says he was five foot 6 which is the height I tell people I am, although I tried to measure myself earlier in the year to find I may actually be 5 foot 5 whoops.

L & I met up with TG and B and we made our way to the spitz. If you don’t know London the Spitalfields market is a large collection of stalls where you can find rugs, records, clothes, lamps, smoothies etc. And a small venue called Spitz. Also its close to brick lane.
>The church there was founded in something like 1110! That’s a long time ago. There use to be burnings of witches on the front landing. Lovely. I would like to see some of those dunking ponds in surrey sometime.

Any how, the spitz, the band was sitting downstairs having a meal, we read Vice and drank a beer. Amstel, that’ll be me. Then we went upstairs to be the first people in the place.

So Herman Dune has five members, and the two support artists are also in the band, so that’s cool- like a family. And the other members of the band came on to support them, which if you get your head around it means we watched three incarnations of the same band. For antifolk it was very folky. She was a tiny bit Joni Mitchell. Really nice sound though, but I wasn’t really in the mood for the solo bits so when the band came on with her it was a bit catchier. The audience kept “shh!ing” people which was a bit conceited, it added to the folkieness to it I guess, but I had the feeling if she picked up an electric guitar they would have yelled “judas!”
The second act was a kind of cross between bob Dylan and the guy no one talks about in turbonegro
He had a great sound.
Then the dune themselves came on- which we had already seen twice by now. The kids deigned to stand for these guys and suddenly you noticed how full the gig was. The singer has a massive beard and facial hair is so in right now, I have only been told yesterday that it is mo-vember so don’t have the time to grow my own for it damn. (I was actually about to write) The singer has a voice that reminds me of Antony and the Jonsons but with a sense of humour. I thought his voice also sounded like they had been touring for a while and straining. A cool gig all in all, and it reminded me I havent been to one for ages. (*forages?). It also met my new self imposed 10 pound limit on gigs. (L bought the tx though). I would give the gig 7 out of 10.
I had two more beers during this time.
Got out, and though I will omit the bits L enjoyed reminding me of this morning got home to find myself rolling drunk. Four beers!! The shame. But I have you know that is over 10 units of alcohol and its not “cool” to binge drink. So I vomited (!) L made me the tastiest beef roll ever and I snored my way into today.
I will put photos that L took of the gig up in the HeadRoom blog when I get them into flickr.



So other than that the Arsenal play Hamburg tonight at home. Which means tube chaos coming out of Holloway Road I guess. We have to win this tonight really and perhaps the draw to Newcastle will be more palatable if it means that it galvanises the team to destroy the Germans tonight. Although Gallas is out, centre back is a position we have covered. Both Djourou and Senderos are fit again and Hoyte scored for the England under 21s. So we could shuffle things a bit, but it is a shame about Gallas though, looks like he will miss the Chelsea game where his experience would have been good, and I would have put a pound on him scorring. We have Gilberto back in as well which will tighten us up a bit. Hamburg I read have only won 2 games this season and have loads of injuries but they do have a fit and scoring van der vaart in who I thought played brilliantly in the world cup.
My bets would be 2 nil Henry scoring the first goal, or a classic 1 nil Adebayor scoring.

Apologies if I spelt any names wrong and its time to publish this and get to work.

A few seconds longer

As an experiment I am writing this in word as to have the ideas flow rather than succumb to the pressure of writing something within the boundaries of having the blog page open awaiting impatiently.

An unfortunate by product of this is a potentially longwinded disjointed piece, but hey- feel free to skip, although I will use some pix as well as a cheap trick to keep you here for a few seconds longer.

Do you think its true in blogs as it is in film that it loses potency as soon as the title is written or spoken during it?

I am loving the new Tom Waits disc – Orphans. I imagine the radio song will be “long way home” which is awesome and catchy even!out today go and get it!

Although one problem with this experiment is that I may just leave this open and not think about it. Its 15:00 already and I have only just remembered! I am working however so its not as if I am ignoring you.

I am thinking of getting this tattoo right here, L. is buying me one for our anniversary so I thought it would be fitting to have a love theme…