IkoStar

“Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk” (said Hemingway to me, (and not for the first time), waggling his most under-control finger in front of his main focusing-eye). So to the best of my ability, I do. Well, I try to.

So um… in exchange (I think) for a cigarette, or nine, I said I’d recommend some music - which is not much of a sacrifice because I am quite attached to the stuff, but where to start? It’s a conundrum.

In the middle then.

The best gig I’ve seen in my life (and I’ve seen literally thousands of them) was Neil Young at Finsbury Park in London in the early 90s. The manager of my band at the time (who also managed Oasis and various Mancunian gliteratti) said it was the best gig he’d seen since The Doors in 1970. It was at the height of the Grunge thing and Neil played heavy metal guitar like the fucking wind. It was wild - and he’s got a back catalogue of absolute classics going back forever.

Can’t find footage of that gig, but I was once driving from Nashville to this party in Green-County Kentucky with a (nother) grunge band who were unaccountably invited to play. I was 25 and drunk and utterly indestructable. There were clouds of crows in the sky - beer and fireworks-stores along the way, and this was on the stereo:

Which cannot possibly be played loud enough. It was one of “those” ultimate moments. Forgive the fan-video.

Which kindof falls naturally on several different levels into the next : The Doors, fictional presidents, drunkenness (Martin Sheen wasn’t acting in this bit) and violence and so on. I never saw The Doors but I’ve seen this movie about 20 times.

And don’t I know it. I still have a scar on my wrist from a drunken window-punching spree in the 80s. Don’t try this at home kids. That old thing about “I wouldn’t recommed alcohol, drugs or insanity to everyone - but they’ve always worked for me” eventually wears a little thin.

Anyway, to go straight from that to the next is kindof an injustice to both… but I think they’re kindof related in some ways - they certainly sound similar at the beginning, but the Jeff Buckley one is like some rarified sublimation of the Doors version. Related too in various ways - that whole fallen angel thing, droney start, twangy bits - but Dream Brother is like Paradise Lost compressed into about 5 minutes. Does my head in - and the chorus comes of of fucking nowhere man… gives me goose bumps - then there’s the final line which is also as chilly as fuck given that the guy did actually drown.

A foot in both worlds.

All of which is a bit kindof heavy and serious etc, so here’s this:

Same droney start, but gone a bit clinky clonky etc.

What’s good about this one is that John Lydon managed to persuade Steve Vai to play on his album and wouldn’t let kick-off on lead guitar on any songs except the end bit of this one - so he tries to fit as many notes as he possibly can into the last 2 minutes. Christ, if that doesn’t give you tinnitus, nothing will. I haven’t heard this in years. Youtube is fucking great.

But actually the main reason for that one is that I think mental guitar solos are hilarious… not a fav song or anything, so I’d best find another one.

Ok - same droney start etc, but completely different from the others. This does my head in a bit as well - she plays her voice like a rhythm instrument - and she’s really good at it, and the lyrics fit and the tune is excellent as well. And she does it in one take, on her own. Incredibly clever.

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Ok, this was going to be the last one of these things because I’ve run out of things that I keep going back to see, and there was only one to go, and procrastination took a hold of me…

… but then I remembered another one, which is up in London so next week I’ll go up and take a photie and talk about that as well. In the meantime however, here’s number 6 : Budapest, Anonymous.

Anonymous was an actual person - a monk who err… has a statue etc, and the statue rocks. Check out the photies on flickr. That’s K for cool.

Anyway, it’s at the back of this castle in Budapest… down the end of this incredibly long road, that gets posher and posher the closer you get. Not as posh as Beverly Hills mind, but those people are idiots. This is the castle:

Which is pretty rad in a Transylvanian sort of way. Bits of it reminded me of Narnia actually. I walked around the outside of the castle, going crunch crunch in the snow etc… there was a corner up ahead with a sort of statuette thing in it… got closer… hmmm… looks familiar… hmmm… who’s that then?

IT’S ONLY BELA LUGOSI !!!

Normally I don’t use exclamation marks, but this time I will. Bela Lugosi…

The archetype of silver-screen vampires. It was so cool I could hardly stand it. I sunk to me knees in the snow etc… then recovered my presence of mind and quickly stood up again (having made sure now one saw me etc).

Bauhaus made this video in the 80s about him, almost:

Although I fail to see the connection. It’s been viewed about 1/2 a million times though, so that’s something.

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I got pissed up a couple of nights ago and went into this massive crying jag (when I got home) and had a dream that all my bodily organs were like little pets etc, and I was treating them really badly and they were lost and afraid. So now I’ve decided to care for them really well to make up for all the stuff that’s gone on before… and I woke up today feeling positive and sortof happy, for the first time in years. I’m off into town to get a smoothie in a bit. They like smoothies.

This is the third one of these I’ve had:

If you click on it you’ll see a version (in a seperate window) the size of the universe.

The first one was given to me by a girl from California called Anne-Marie Murietta, who I’ve lost touch with now… which is a shame because she saved my arse on at least 3 occasions. If at some point she (or someone else she knows) googles her, they’ll find this and can get in touch. I managed to hold onto the ring for a good 10 years or so… then made a flamboyant gesture in this bar and it went flying off onto a crowded dance floor never to be seen again. Not dissimilar to Anne-Marie herself in some ways - only she went flying off in a plane, and wound up in Los Angeles rather than a dance floor.

The second one came from Susan… I saw one in a shop in Brighton and I forced her to buy it for me. She’s nice like that etc… and it weren’t cheap neither. That one met a similar fate to the previous one, only I don’t remember the actual incident.

The third I had made for me at even huger expense than the others… so it’s more or less identical to the previous ones, and it’s the one I have now. I feel completely lost with out it… and it kindof connects me to two people, even though technically I gave this one to myself, myself.

There was this one time in the 90s when I was seeing this hypnotist in Harley Street in London, attempting to deal with cocaine addiction or whatever… we talked about what was involved, the situation… the procedure etc, then we began the first session and he started to talk me down etc. Just like they do with the cartoon mice on TV.

Being an inveterate fiddler however, I managed to lose control of it (again) and it went rolling under this big mahogany desk in the corner so we spent the rest of the session on our hands and knees trying to retrieve it. So that was the end of that.

I’m not sure that the hypnotism worked entirely. I kept sitting there thinking “am I? am I?, I don’t think I am? How do you tell?” and not really paying attention to what he was saying. I did stop taking drugs though… but via some weird, wild coincidence that I can’t quite explain either - and that was decades ago… and anyway, what do you expect. Someone once said about Tony Blair “He played in a band. How can you trust anyone who’s played in a band but never smoked a joint?”. Yes. Well, you can trust me.

Anyway - back to hypnotism… unconvinced etc, but it was hugely preferable to the acupuncture sessions I had to try and get rid of RSI - NOBODY TOLD ME THEY WERE GOING TO STICK PINS IN ME !!! - unbelievable. The bloke who did it seemed fairly knowledgeable - I probably would’ve gone back and just kindof treated it as a therapy session… but having pins stuck in you forces you to focus your mind.

Still. Whatever:

There’s this thing over there —-> about these eco-planes, which look pretty cool etc. Apparently they’re solar powered, and the cockpit bit is filled up with a mixture of helium and nitrous oxide, which is doubly environmentally friendly because you just sit on the runway pissing yourself with laughter in squeaky cartoon-mouse voices… and never manage to take off.

Genius.

ps: Just because this is the third or possibly fourth time that I’ve mentioned cartoon mice on drugs, does NOT mean that I’m obsessed with cartoon mice on drugs. Quite the opposite in fact.

Ok, it’s probably time I wrote more stuff on this - I’ve been a bit distracted of late on account of living in Estonia now, but more on that later etc.

First, something fairly important to get out of the way:

A street scene in Copenhagen etc :

Nothing unusual in that, I here you crie, looks completely normal to me? WTF?

But look a little closer…

Yes, the restaurant with the abandoned pram outside it has a clock… which says a qtr to nine… AND THAT WAS ACTUALLY WHAT THE TIME WAS!!!

Incredible. If you come from England you will never have seen that before. No public clock ever knows the time… but I started noticing them here, and they’re everywhere. Amazing. The Danish have somehow managed to synchronise every clock in the country. It must have taken years.

The only clock in the whole of England that tells the correct time is Big Ben - and as The English have forgotten how to read the time on clocks with hands (apart from lawyers and things), the point is largely moot (which is a legal term) (and anyway, time itself was invented by a Scotsman (the same one that invented roads, and golf) so maybe that’s why), it’s mainly there for the tourists, but in Denmark they all seem to know what the time is. Here’s another one

And another.

I expect that these people are probably thinking OMG, is that the time?, we’ve missed the news. LOL.

Except in Danish… assuming these people are Danish. They seem Danish.

That first restaurant is called Le Pettit Tortus, which is Danish for The Little Tortoise. I was sitting opposite in a place called Huks Fluks. Fuck knows what that means.

It’s probably not even spelt properly, but it’s not always easy to tell with foreign words. Good food though. Norwegian King Crabs from Norway.

This is a rare shot of Susan not complaining about anything - although from this angle it’s difficult to gauge what sort of mood she’s in. It could go either way. Best just keep quiet at the moment eh.

(oh, that’s Norway in the background btw)

Ok, so we went to that Reboot 10 the other day, which is a kind of intelligent-conversation-a-thon etc, where people stand about drinking coffee out of tiny little plastic cups, talking about interesting stuff and generally planning the future… so I thought, yes, that sounds like my sort of thing etc, so I got on a plane and 30 hours later I was in Copenhagen eating these fish things.

Apparently they’ve had these things for years etc,

But this is the first one I’ve been to so the whole thing was probably better than it’s ever been before.

Met lots of interesting people etc
and went out and got slightly pissed a couple of times which was excellent as well even though I was far too jetlagged to deal with that sort of thing etc, and a special thanks goes out to Natbats etc who is ever so nice, and without who’s asprins I would surely have died. I wore a purple paisley shirt on the first day and a green stripey one on the second. Right now I’m wearing a red t-shirt with the letters SALE on it, which is just like the ones they have during sales in which everything in the shop is for sale except the only thing you want, which is the shirt with SALE on it. The Danish word for sale is UDSLAG (almost) which I quite like as well.

I can’t actually speak Danish, but the whole reboot thing was in English but with lots of different accents etc. Being monolingual in such circs makes me feel like a crappy old plastic bit of hardware from the 90s (like one of those zip-drives with the big plastic cassette things) that the new hardware has special adaptors for so we can still understand what’s going on etc. They’re quite clever these people.

Anyway, the Clearleft lot were there in force etc, and had at least 4 presentations between them that were absolutely packed etc. This is the one that Andy Budd did…

Which was about applying user experience graphs to absolutely everything including family and friends, hotels, evenings down the pub afterwards etc. It also reminded me of those socks you used to be able to get in the 70s where you could buy 7 pairs in a rainbow pattern etc - but you still only wear one lot at a time so what’s the point of that. To be fair, I was extremely distracted by the girl sitting behind the guy in the aeronautics shirt who looked like she might be gorgeous etc. Hard to tell from that angle, etc… and maybe it’s best to leave it that way. Who knows.

Anyway, I like Andy - he’s a collosus among men etc, and can talk for hours on any subject. Here’s another one where he’s explaining string-theory etc to some Danish people in a bar-type thing later that night.

I’m outside scrounging fags off the locals and generally waving my arms about and singing etc.

I like these conferancy things. I feel as neurotic as fuck to start with and generally hide under the table behind the boxes that the little plastic cups come in… but after a while I kindof get into the groove and start chattering etc. They make all sorts of mad little thoughts bubble into your head for ages afterwards… like :

- IP is memetic eugenics
- It would be quite cool to have a “goodie bag” which had a god-kit - ie: a massive false beard, a voice synthesiser thing with loads of distortion and echo and a massive plastic inflateable bible for smiting unbelievers and small children etc. That would rock it would give you authority and gravitas etc.
- The new rock and roll isn’t as rock and roll as the old rock and roll.
- I might move to Sweden actually.

and so on. If I go to the next one I think I might to a micro-presentation about… I don’ t know… everything I learned the year before I guess. I probably ought to have written it down.

See?

There’s a photie in The Guardian

If that’s what vegetarianism does for you then I think I’ll stick to kebab-burgers or whatever. I used to be a vegatarian once. Ate chips.

Before you do anything, go down a bit and stop that meaning of life one from going off again. Autoplay. Annoying.

And then come back, and check this out :

You kindof forget what it’s like sometimes. That’s probably what I would’ve been like if I stayed in Scotland.

But I didn’t. I wound up in England etc.

One line leads to another, as they say…

It’s all fucking culture. Fucking all of of. Innit. We don’t fuck about. Kick it.