(no subject)
Properly back into the London routine now after spending half-term week in . Friendly people and splendid food but it wasn't the greatest, because of a number of mishaps. The main one being that we chose a hotel "30 minutes' walk" from St Ives centre. It wasn't actually possible to walk it because there was no footpath, roadside, anything. Hedge/road/cars flying about at lunatic speeds. This hotel had an amazing evening menu so the plan was: big walks in the day, dinner in the hotel every night. Except the chef had broken his leg and the kitchen was shut.
The weather was shocking as well. It wasn't non-stop rain every day, but I think it had been in the few days before we got there, and Cornwall was just one great big puddle of mud. One day we went out to Zennor, DH Lawrence's old stamping ground, and walked the 7 miles back to St Ives along the Cornish coastal path. The view was stunning -swooping hills and headlands, vertiginous black cliff-faces, heavy waves throwing themselves onto the rugged rocks- but the walk nearly killed me. The ground just kept crumbling beneath our feet, I had at least 50 bad falls. Besides the bumps and bruises I cut my hands to ribbons by grasping at the thorny foliage each time I went airborne. When we got back my feet were so I wet I could feel fish swimming around my toes, so I bought £6 shoes from a charity shop and socks from Edinburgh Wool Company. Then we went into a cosy, quiet pub playing Motown, I had a few pints of Cornish bitter and read the Telegraph cover-to-cover while Kate did some lesson planning. It was blissful to be so far away from cruel nature.
Penzance was a stanadard grim provincial town with most of the high street shops, but we found the bits worth seeing by picking up a historical walk map. St Ives I liked very much; little fishing village with whitewashed cottages, it has a definite Prisoner/Wicker Man vibe to it. We bought combined tickets for the Tate museum and the house of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. A middle-aged matron checked our tickets going into the Tate, and 2 hours later on the other side of town, when we entered the Hepworth place the very same woman checked our tickets! I raised a McGoohan eyebrow.
The Tate was being curated by some Austrian bloke. I had no time for his own stuff (cardboard boxes spray-painted black) but in the other rooms he had some good stuff; Picasso, Duchamp, Elizabeth Frink's birds. The penultimate room I really enjoyed because it was the art equivalent of a DJ set juxtaposing Bobby Goldsboro, Cannibal Corpse, Vivaldi and Go-Kart Mozart. Huge panoramic painting of girls picking flowers in the Tyrol, mixed with modernist paintings of lines and bright colours, mixed with Baconesque distorted portraits and old French paintings of comely ladies in Turkish baths. He obviously had so much fun putting it together. The music being piped through was a recorder and a guitar, completely out of tune with each other and being played really badly, so you couldn't stay in too long without feeling ill. The Hepworth sculptures certainly look good but Christ knows if they mean anything.
We played our annual London gig on Tuesday at Madame Jojos. Moustaches are still fashionable I see. It wasn't a bad night out though; Wet Dog, who I hadn't seen for ages, were the other support band and played a fine set. As well as catching up with some ex-Violets, we met the bloke who owns Domino and the guy from the Klaxons asked us if we still make records. It was tempting to reciprocate. There was a bit of a rush to put Andrew on the last train because after waiting ages for a bus, we were informed by a road sweeper that Oxford St was shut while they put up the Christmas lights.
Thursday I went up to the lane for Spurs-Zagreb and we put in our performance of the season, a blinding 4-0. It's the same players and very similar formation/tactics but they are unrecognisable from two weeks ago. Very strange. I think the Redknapps and Lampards are part of the mafia/dynasty/lodge who control English football and I could see this happening, actually. Under Ramos we lost at least 10 points from joke penalty decisions, disallowed goals, red cards, &c. At Redknapp's first match, Bolton had a fairly harsh red card just when they were coming back into it and were killed off by an uncertain penalty. Changing the manager always brings in a massive improvement, the difficult part is stopping the rot from setting in after 2/3 years.
Last night we went to Yo Sushi and then the Fly, to see the other band of the guitarist from Steve & Kate's new band. The support act were pretty good, a quite 60s seven-piece with lots of harmonising and big tunes. They made me laugh though because the lead singer was a little bearded bald bloke, and they had a sultry Winona Ryder/Scarlett Johansson hybrid on tambourine and occasional backing vocals. Guess who was centre stage and who was pushed off to the side? The promoter was introducing the main band and namechecking all the people from other bands in the audience. "We've got so-and-so in the house!" *cheers*. "We've got blah-de-blah in the house!" *cheers*. One of the band leant into his mic and shouted "And The Vichy Government!" The promoter frowned and said "No! They've left, they've gone."
I've felt a bit lonely this week as I've seen people go completely cock-a-hoop over Obama. Okay, symbolically it is a step forward and a pretty big deal. But going on past experience, do you really think he'll make everything better? When he makes a speech promising change and hope, everyone else gets all inspired and I think, that's utterly meaningless. Politicians don't get into it to make your life better, they do it out of vanity. Even if those were his motives, how did he raise the billions needed to get into the White House? How else but by agreeing that he would do everything the banks, the investors, hedge funds, arms traders who have put him there ask? The expectations have become absurd and I think it's all going to end in tears.
The weather was shocking as well. It wasn't non-stop rain every day, but I think it had been in the few days before we got there, and Cornwall was just one great big puddle of mud. One day we went out to Zennor, DH Lawrence's old stamping ground, and walked the 7 miles back to St Ives along the Cornish coastal path. The view was stunning -swooping hills and headlands, vertiginous black cliff-faces, heavy waves throwing themselves onto the rugged rocks- but the walk nearly killed me. The ground just kept crumbling beneath our feet, I had at least 50 bad falls. Besides the bumps and bruises I cut my hands to ribbons by grasping at the thorny foliage each time I went airborne. When we got back my feet were so I wet I could feel fish swimming around my toes, so I bought £6 shoes from a charity shop and socks from Edinburgh Wool Company. Then we went into a cosy, quiet pub playing Motown, I had a few pints of Cornish bitter and read the Telegraph cover-to-cover while Kate did some lesson planning. It was blissful to be so far away from cruel nature.
Penzance was a stanadard grim provincial town with most of the high street shops, but we found the bits worth seeing by picking up a historical walk map. St Ives I liked very much; little fishing village with whitewashed cottages, it has a definite Prisoner/Wicker Man vibe to it. We bought combined tickets for the Tate museum and the house of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. A middle-aged matron checked our tickets going into the Tate, and 2 hours later on the other side of town, when we entered the Hepworth place the very same woman checked our tickets! I raised a McGoohan eyebrow.
The Tate was being curated by some Austrian bloke. I had no time for his own stuff (cardboard boxes spray-painted black) but in the other rooms he had some good stuff; Picasso, Duchamp, Elizabeth Frink's birds. The penultimate room I really enjoyed because it was the art equivalent of a DJ set juxtaposing Bobby Goldsboro, Cannibal Corpse, Vivaldi and Go-Kart Mozart. Huge panoramic painting of girls picking flowers in the Tyrol, mixed with modernist paintings of lines and bright colours, mixed with Baconesque distorted portraits and old French paintings of comely ladies in Turkish baths. He obviously had so much fun putting it together. The music being piped through was a recorder and a guitar, completely out of tune with each other and being played really badly, so you couldn't stay in too long without feeling ill. The Hepworth sculptures certainly look good but Christ knows if they mean anything.
We played our annual London gig on Tuesday at Madame Jojos. Moustaches are still fashionable I see. It wasn't a bad night out though; Wet Dog, who I hadn't seen for ages, were the other support band and played a fine set. As well as catching up with some ex-Violets, we met the bloke who owns Domino and the guy from the Klaxons asked us if we still make records. It was tempting to reciprocate. There was a bit of a rush to put Andrew on the last train because after waiting ages for a bus, we were informed by a road sweeper that Oxford St was shut while they put up the Christmas lights.
Thursday I went up to the lane for Spurs-Zagreb and we put in our performance of the season, a blinding 4-0. It's the same players and very similar formation/tactics but they are unrecognisable from two weeks ago. Very strange. I think the Redknapps and Lampards are part of the mafia/dynasty/lodge who control English football and I could see this happening, actually. Under Ramos we lost at least 10 points from joke penalty decisions, disallowed goals, red cards, &c. At Redknapp's first match, Bolton had a fairly harsh red card just when they were coming back into it and were killed off by an uncertain penalty. Changing the manager always brings in a massive improvement, the difficult part is stopping the rot from setting in after 2/3 years.
Last night we went to Yo Sushi and then the Fly, to see the other band of the guitarist from Steve & Kate's new band. The support act were pretty good, a quite 60s seven-piece with lots of harmonising and big tunes. They made me laugh though because the lead singer was a little bearded bald bloke, and they had a sultry Winona Ryder/Scarlett Johansson hybrid on tambourine and occasional backing vocals. Guess who was centre stage and who was pushed off to the side? The promoter was introducing the main band and namechecking all the people from other bands in the audience. "We've got so-and-so in the house!" *cheers*. "We've got blah-de-blah in the house!" *cheers*. One of the band leant into his mic and shouted "And The Vichy Government!" The promoter frowned and said "No! They've left, they've gone."
I've felt a bit lonely this week as I've seen people go completely cock-a-hoop over Obama. Okay, symbolically it is a step forward and a pretty big deal. But going on past experience, do you really think he'll make everything better? When he makes a speech promising change and hope, everyone else gets all inspired and I think, that's utterly meaningless. Politicians don't get into it to make your life better, they do it out of vanity. Even if those were his motives, how did he raise the billions needed to get into the White House? How else but by agreeing that he would do everything the banks, the investors, hedge funds, arms traders who have put him there ask? The expectations have become absurd and I think it's all going to end in tears.