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foxes divinorum

23 November, 2008 – 11:27pm

Foxes! came to stay last night after their London gig, including Alan and Dymphna, who drove them around. Kayla had some salvia divinorum with her. I was really interested in trying it so we smoked some. I had tried to take it before, to no effect, so this time I inhaled lots and kept it in, and got hit quite hard by the psychedelic experience!

I suddenly felt I was flying backwards through the room and my vision became fuzzy, and then everything started breaking up into floating rods of reality. I just about held it together to stagger from the room, though it felt more like I had become the room and I was ejecting this piece of consciousness out of it.

What was left of me fell on to the bed and at this moment I felt I was in several places at once. I was the bed, I was floating in little rods through the air above the bed, and some of me was within this human body too. Most of all I felt like I was the bed and I remember thinking: what will those others say when they come in here and find that I, the bed, have become conscious? I won’t be able to walk or talk for one thing. I knew it wasn’t a good thing.

Then Kayla popped her head round the door and I returned to my human self. It had all lasted just a few minutes. I staggered back into the living room. They had taken some in my absence. Matt felt like he was rotating inside a giant pine cone, made of up spikes from the rapid drums of the Nina Simone version of I Did It My Way that was playing at that moment. He had to put out his legs and hold one finger up in the air to rotate with the pine cone. Kayla pressed her face to the floor and had to shift objects through some sort of carpet house that she found herself in.

Kayla and I took a second milder dose and this time it was more of a mushrooms experience, lots of giggling and amplified cartoon reality.

It’s a really interesting drug. The effect is so intense, but then it’s over so quickly, and the high is quite different from anything else I’ve taken. The sensation of fragmenting your consciousness and actually becoming objects around you is quite an extraordinary feeling.

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22 November, 2008 – 3:53pm

Matt and I visited Firsts 2008 at the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House last night to see the Modified Toy Orchestra, who are part of this cool circuit bending movement, taking children’s toys and wiring them up to amps and playing weird catchy calculator doll bleep music. They were very good and great fun to watch, deploying their little plastic toys in dramatic deadpan guitar feedback poses, with funny kawaii visuals projected up behind them.

I love this kind of thing. For me it’s all about the startling creativity that can be induced by strict parameters and limitations. What kind of music can you create with a load of plastic kid’s toys? These guys will show you! It’s like Braben and Bell’s Elite, but for music instead of cool space exploration computer games!

I saw this interview somewhere else with Brian Duffy, the humorous lead man in the orchestra:

“It’s much harder to perform live than anything I’ve ever done before,” Duffy says. “When it comes to playing tiny plastic mushrooms, you’ve got to be ­incredibly ­accurate – it takes months to get it right. I’ll be teaching a new member a part, and ­saying, ‘No! It’s ­fencepost, fencepost, mushroom, mushroom, daisy, sunflower – you’re playing it all wrong!’”

We also saw in support a pair of very fit hip hop dancers from The Impact Dance Company, and then an intriguing dancer called Claire Cunningham who danced with her crutches while narrating her life growing up with legs that don’t work normally. Her piece of physical theatre was called Evolution and it seems to be partly about describing how dance has come to be a form of physical therapy for her, increasing her bone density and height as she says at one point, this is perhaps part of the evolution for which she has named the performance. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” she says near the end, and you have this sense of her being a growing changing amalgamation of crutches and person. “But I like it.” She finished with this amazing dance to Singing In The Rain which echoed the dance in the film really pleasingly, including sweeping the crutches around like the umbrella swinging around over the puddles.

posted in music, theatre | no comments »

tooting hat game

20 November, 2008 – 11:31pm

Worked from home this morning, then took a bath at Phil’s flat so I could get rid of my rapidly growing beard, before an incredibly stressful attempt to organise a video conferenced carol service between Ghana and London. Then to Mant and Want’s house, with Jon, Rosemary and Charlie, deep down south on the northern line for lovely stew, chilli sauce and crumble.

We played the hat game, if there’s a random person out there reading this who doesn’t know the game, it’s where you write words on bits of paper, fold them up, then pick them out at random and describe the word to your team without saying the word itself and they have to guess what it is. But on this occasion we were playing it just with famous people. I prefer having to describe any word, but famous people has its appeal too, the game goes quicker for one thing. Right wing dictators kept coming up, we got through most of the Nazis. Interestingly, Boris Johnson cropped up three times. This was good fun when we got to the stage where you mime them, as we got to stumble around having floppy hair and knocking things over in a gaffe-prone sort of way.

posted in dinner | 2 comments »

cocks and frocks

19 November, 2008 – 11:26pm

Met up with Charlotte and Matt in the Village, followed by Friendly Society and a late night tapas at Cafe Espana. We haven’t been in a gay bar for so long, it was intriguing. I may have to stage a second coming out and break my long seclusion from the scene. After all, the 1980s recession created much of the London gay scene, but the coming recession could break it. We need to support them and buy their crap lager and double G&Ts. Still, it’s all about the venue, not the drinks. The pumping conversation drowning pop music! The careful glances and appraising nods! The muscular bar staff in sleeveless vests! My weekly copy of QX magazine! Oh Soho, I shall not desert thee.

posted in gayness, lunch | no comments »

tiling together

18 November, 2008 – 11:24pm

Matt and I resumed work on the bathroom this evening, we’re halfway round the wall with the tiles, but when oh when will we be able to bathe again? (when we’ve sorted out the grout obviously)

posted in diy | no comments »

on a visionary flood of alcohol

18 November, 2008 – 9:22am

Saw Leonard Cohen again at the Royal Albert Hall with Maffs, Rachel and Chazza last night. So good. He repeated all the same jokes like the showman he is, the Webb sisters did a back flip, and he did lots of skipping on and off stage. This time when he played Democracy Is Coming To The USA, everyone cheered when the chorus came round and I got a second wave of drunken post-Obama elation.

posted in music | no comments »

birthday weekend tiling

16 November, 2008 – 8:26pm

Well, everyone in the world is 30 this weekend, so apologies to all the birthday bashes we haven’t attended! So many births at this time of year - is it from all the rutting around Valentine’s Day?

Matt and I have been hiding away all weekend doing plumbing and tiling in our little bathroom with Matt’s dad and brother. Soon our bathroom will be a glorious monument to lapis tiburtinus! Mind you, there’s still a lot of tiling to go. Our flat is amazingly messy and cluttered with tools and debris.

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aida allens

12 November, 2008 – 1:16am

Joined up with Rachel and Chas to go and see Aida at the Coliseum, Rachel had got us tickets for Matt’s birthday. We had lovely dress circle seats at the front so we could lean and look out over everything, and the sound was pretty good.

I really enjoyed this opera: it’s storming stomping Verdi and visually utterly over the top, with fantastic costumes and sets designed by Zandra Rhodes. So all the chorus men are wearing golden skirts and blue facepaint, the pharoah and his daughter have great big headpiece, an enormous turquoise elephant makes an appearance at one point, and there are lots of great dance scenes to keep us entertained in the musical interludes.

Nothing is very subtle at al, but I like it that way. Besides, in days of yore, the pyramids were probably polished to a shine, topped with gold cladding, and buildings would have been whitewashed and brightly painted, I can imagine ancient Egypt was probably just as gaudy as Zandra Rhodes, if not more so.

Afterwards, we met up with Chas’s friends Nigel and Trisha and had a late night dinner at Joe Allen’s, the marvellous New York theatre land style late night restaurant. The last time Rachel had been was in the 1970s shortly after it had opened. Rachel’s got an ear infection at the moment, and Trisha is going deaf, so we sat them in the middle and had some amusing translation going on. In contrast to my own strategy which is to nod and smile when I don’t hear something, Trisha has a fun policy of leaping in with whatever she thinks you might have said.

“So I went to Pakistan for a month.”
“Cheese grater?”
“Not exactly, but I did try very spicy food for the first time.”
“You decided to make tomato salad?”

They haven’t yet adopted hearing aids and lip reading so I was rather at an advantage for once!

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beer making

10 November, 2008 – 12:11am

Matt and I went to Andy and Jo’s today to join them in using Andy’s new micro brewing kit. We were mashing (steeping) the malted barley, sparging out the sugary water to make some nice brown wort, boiling up the wort and adding hops.

Dave and little Tabby came along too for a bit to lend their beery expertise. Tabby wheeled a little trolley up and down the room serving us houmous and carrots, occasionally pausing to test Matt’s reactions by hitting him on the knee with a wooden spoon.

Matt, Jo, Andy and I also played  a cool new game we got yesterday from a stand at Spirit of Christmas:  Marrakech. It’s a lovely simple four player game where you lay out little carpets all over the souk and compete to cover the most space while charging each other for stepping on each other’s carpets.

Then we had spaghetti bolognaise and put the boiled beer outside to cool down. Maffs and I had to head off so he could make a cake this evening, Andy will be putting the yeast in the beer when it’s cooled to room temperature. With any luck, he should have something that tastes like Timothy Taylor’s Landlord within a week!

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oak and cyanide

8 November, 2008 – 11:05pm

Off to Loman Road last night for another classic party. All kinds of people were in attendance, including a highly fancy dressed young group from the Serpentine Gallery. There was some marvellous mulled wine and various Moscow Mule style cocktails. I talked about Obama to anyone who would listen.

Later on, Michal, Kevin and DP all converged on the party, the combination naturally sparking off copious drug taking in their vicinity. I got a nice bump of K and had a good session of wonky dancing with Michal.

What a splendid drug K is. I was thinking the other day about the best songs for dancing on K. Its dissociative anaesthetic properties suggest vocoders to me.

Number one song is probably Digital Love by Daft Punk, the essence of pulling in the bright lights and darkness of the eternal nightclub, with talkbox vocals!

Number two is Slow by Kylie, because … well, it’s slow. Skip a beat and whoah, my foreground has just completely disconnected from the background!

Number three is We Are The Robots by Kraftwerk. We’re functioning automatic, and we are dancing mechanic! We are the robots!

posted in party | no comments »