Top
Nonsense
These We have Loved
BLOGADOON
LATEST
next week
previous week
first week
Blogmarks
Links
Responses to:
blogadoon@iansie.com
º March 19th-March 25th 2001
Sunday Ex-men
Saturday Qua Nation
Friday Soups of the world 3
Thursday It's fraud, Maud
Wednesday Looks good
Tuesday Shirt-lifter
Monday Hate Harvey
º Sunday 25th March 2001
Watched X-men last night. A almost determinedly unsexy movie with no script to speak of, no humour, and certainly no post-modern irony. And yet I quite liked it. How does that work?
Mislaid at work yesterday: the Chancellor, Golden Brown; the gay icon, Hemorrhoid Mary; the 60s pop star, Roy Ombudsman.
º Saturday 24th March 2001
I was supposed to spend last night talking to Sven at The Spiral, but he no-showed, so I passed a couple of hours talking to a man who could break my heart, if he tried.
Luke on nicknames: "The true value of the nickname is when it's shouted across a crowded pub, hitting its owner, and raising a warm smile of recognition..."
To get the full flavour of this remark, you have to have noticed that one of Luke's friends appears to have been nicknamed: Cunt.
Compared to which, iansie seems pretty innocuous.
More bar news:
Following Vicky's arbitrary decision to close their upstairs room at 333, One Nation falls into the eager, spendy arms of Turnmills every Sunday night from April 8th.
Strangers to the London gay scene may not understand the fascinating history at work here:
Turnmills has long been synonymous with Trade, which opens at 4am on Saturday nights and rolls on into Sunday afternoons. Sunday evenings at Turnmills, on the other hand, have always been problematic, and most every gay club promoter has had a go (and failed) at making it work.
Queer Nation has been going for years, retailing soul-flavoured garage to a relatively sophisticated crowd, often in the teeth of the techno domination that has ruled the rest of the scene. I first found Queer Nation when it was at The Gardening Club in Covent Garden, ten years or so ago, and since then it's moved south of the river to Brixton to Substation South, latterly spawning One Nation, a North London variant once a month at 333 on Friday nights.
Vicky is almost mythically-hated by many older gays, on account of her having taken the old, and much-loved, London Apprentice and turned it into the Shoreditch-friendly 333, a venue which (with the notable exception of One Nation) has proved predominantly straight, until a month or so ago with the advent of LA3, which is just beginning to get into its stride - on Sunday nights...
Stay tuned (and see me for tickets).
Speaking as a Mac owner, I'm quite tempted by Tom's offer of a knockdown price on a IBM 6X86 PR 200 with, like everything (scanner, printer, speakers, la la la), for something over 150 quid. Trouble is I'd have to arrange a minicab to Maida Vale to pick it up. Sometimes my lethargy worries even me. Go on, make a fool of me and buy the damn thing before I do.
º Friday 23rd March 2001
My links page seems to be getting a lot of hits, which is good. Unless y'all are checking it out to see if I've listed your blog, which is bad, because that information is at Blogmarks.
And (file under doh) if I have listed you...have you listed me? Hmm? HMMMMM?
Soups of the World part three:
Covent Garden Soup Company 'Parsnip & Coconut' You look at the name, and go 'Eeuw'. Then you take a first spoonful, and go 'Hmmm'. Then you have some more, and go 'Nah'. (But Guy likes it.)
Tesco 'Smoked Haddock Chowder' Mystifying combination of bland and repellent. Like baby shark spunk (but less...thrilling).
Tesco 'Chicken Mulligatawny' Curried soup - not a good idea at the best of times. That Lewis Carroll name - unpromising. And a texture like a sick camel's bowel movement. Got to be vile, right? Wrong - this is the chunkiest, tastiest, horniest, most kickin-ass soup to feature so far. Three crossed spoons up.
Left David at Leicester Square tube, then stormed up Charing Cross Road because I hoped to redeem yet another evening's drunken self-indulgence by at least getting to Tescos at Liverpool Street before they closed at midnight.
Decided, given that it couldn't be much later than half past, that I could afford the time to take a bus, and hopped onto a 38 just as it pulled away.
Realised, for the second time in ten days, as the bus turned off towards Islington, that it's the 36 that goes to Liverpool Street.
Stormed down Chancery Lane and onto the Central Line, stormed up the stairs at Liverpool Street and into Tescos, weaving my way past tired-looking people re-stocking shelves, congratulating myself that I'd made it with two minutes to spare.
Shopped very leisurely (hey, I'm in the store, you can't close it round my ears suckah), piling packets into my basket with no discernable plan. (Hey: soup! Mmm: pizza.)
Waited for what seemed an age at the check-out, then drifted out of the store wondering why they seemed in no hurry to close. Checked opening times on the door. They're now open twenty-four hours.
Too late for a bus, so I stood waiting for a cab underneath a broken clock. Streets seemed busier than one would normally expect at twenty past midnight. Had a thought. Asked a stranger the time.
Twenty past eleven.
Suckah.
We checked out Bluebeat (see below), and it was basically an Italian restaurant basement minus food plus DJ. Several tablesful of what looked like a post-teen birthday party, a handful of mildly dodgy-looking geezers at the bar, and us: twenty five people in all? Perfectly pleasant, mellow even, but hardly quote - a storming night - unquote.
(Still no clue as to what 'tech breaks' might be - ed)
º Thursday 22nd March 2001
News of new gay London Thursday nights from the excellent discodamaged list:
- Bluebeat, 11 St. Martins Court WC2, 1900-2300, "cool tech house/tech breaks" (whatever they are - ed) "Recommended by reliable sources."
- Gummi Hanky Code at The Block, 2200-0300 "each week has a special theme, vacuum pumps being this weeks". Uh huh.
- Naked at The Vauxhall "times/prices TBC, Simon Le Vans DJs and there will be a couple of strippers each week at this new night."
And on Saturday:
- Up, Whitechapel
- Manifest, The Fringe, 330 Kennington Lane, Vauxhall, 2200-late, "Rubber, leather, uniform, younger people, fully equipped dungeon + DJ Psyche." (13 quid, eep).
Note: Oi! London launches at The Manifest on 20th April.
Easter Sunday: Giant (Heaven, Trade, Crash, Barcode and The Hoist) at Bagleys, 2200-0600, 15 quid a ticket.
A recent story in the Independent gives some of the background to the demise of e-district.net, and their prime asset, leisuredistrict.net, but just three sets of figures say it all:
- leisuredistrict's revenues for the 17 months to Dec '99
Claimed: :£781,571
Actual: :£98,000
- revenues to June 2000
Claimed: :£1,000,000
Actual: :£32,000
- page impressions last month
Claimed: :367 million
Actual: :57 million
"The Metropolitan Police fraud squad has been notified, and the Serious Fraud Office is also conducting an investigation." No shit, Sherlock.
White Swan. Very dull. Except for...(Oh yes, and...)
Afterwards, however...And...
So...And then....
But apart from that, very dull.
º Wednesday 21st March 2001
Wow. Dave resigns...
I don't think I've ever resigned from a job. But then again, I haven't worked for anybody else since, eep, 1976.
Plus, resigning is not really my thing. Passive-aggressive, you see. I just hang around being more and more vile until they finally fire me. (Doesn't make life any more pleasant for anybody else but then again, I figure that if God had put me here to make other people's lives more pleasant, he would have made me blonde.)
Yes, Jonathan, we certainly have been there (tho having a cam does help sort the men from the boys, as it were...)
Last week, Blogadoon bought you news of the email address of His Royal Highness Crown Prince Aleksandar II of Yugoslavia, who can be reached via HRHCPAlex@btinternet.com. Somewhat infra dig, we thought.
This week, we learn that George Bush's private email account, the one he used on the campaign trail to keep in touch with friends and family, must now be abandoned lest it become subject to open-record requests. And that address is: G94B@aol.com.
Assholes on-line, uh huh.
Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834-1900) was a senior partner in a silk mercers, a collector of watercolours and a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Madrid. He also, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, "formed an unrivalled assortment of Kruptadia."
You know what Kruptadia is? Neither did I till just now. But think of the greek root crypto-...Give in?
Kruptadia, apparently, is nineteenth century book dealers' code for...yup...porn. Ashbee's collection of over 15,000 books was bequeathed to the British Library.
Kruptadia.org, anybody?
Colour me a big fan of other people's photo-disasters, but Jerwin's made me laugh out loud (which at 5:30am is probably not good news for my neighbours).
News that HBO has renewed Oz for a fifth season will gladden the hearts of those of us who enjoyed finding scattered episodes of season three late on Channel 4 towards the end of last year.
For those of you who've never seen it: think Prisoner Cell Block H but without its tongue in its cheek, and with an all-male hunka-hunka cast. Homo-erotic? My dear: its overtones have overtones...
Series four of Oz is currently showing on E4 on Fridays at 10 (apparently); let's hope it turns up on C4 sometime this autumn...
Things that only strike you as a bit surreal when you're tottering home at midnight a little bit pissed (aka Things That Dear Oscar Never Had To Deal With):
- a Solitary Man, supported by several huge stainless steel cases on wheels, crafting intricate and intense surgery, with a scalpel, on the inner tyre of the hand-rail of the down escalator at Waterloo
- two Overcoats in the lift at Wapping station whose entire upward-bound conversation consists of: "But I must say I do tend to agree with you when you say that it is perhaps just a little bit sad when you find that you have spent an entire evening talking shop" followed by a long pause, followed by the lift arriving top-side and the doors opening, followed by "Looks good!"
- an Indigent. who accosts you from the other side of the deserted road (and this is the scarey bit) not in the West End but a mere hundred yards from your flat, shouting "Oi Mate" who then crosses the road to enquire: "Y'ain't got 50p on ya, have ya, bruvs?"
º Tuesday 20th March 2001
7:54 pm Oh dear, Blogspot seems to be on the fritz, leaving all of us sisters-doing-it-for-themselves as the only reading matter out there.
But hey guys and gals, if you're rilly rilly desperate to fill a Monday evening poking yer noses into other people's pasts: there's always the archives...
The source-code messaging meme has been vastly overvalued, imho, but for those who care about these things and find themselves frustrated by no-right-click scripts, windows without file menus or url boxes, and 'referrer' pages that cannot be seen in your browser: CodeLifter. (It also lets you access css scripts, which could be useful.)
º Monday 19th March 2001
If the man who kissed me and addressed me by name at the Vauxhall yesterday afternoon, and who greeted me as I stumbled past him at Waterloo later in the evening is reading this - please identify yourself. (Dreadfully sorry, but I haven't the faintest idea who you are...)
Y'all can't have helped noticing how the dreaded Burberry check is out on the streets of London in even more force than usual this winter, and not just wrapped around the necks of Japanese tourists.
I thought the nadir of this particular meme was the Burberry check shirt I saw on someone in the White Swan the other week. But lo: there's Jonathan ('Beautiful Thing') Harvey wearing the same shirt on the front page of the Independent's (soi-disant) Culture section this Sunday.
Three more reasons to hate Jonathan Harvey:
- he's written a musical with the Pet Shop Boys (Closer To Heaven previewing at the Arts Theatre from 15 May)
- his new play 'Out in the Open' premieres at the Hampstead Theatre this week, directed by Kathy Burke
- he's 33.
Kathy Burke on Jonathan Harvey: "I love the fact he doesn't flower his writing up by trying to to be too intellectual." Fer sher.
Stephen Fry on why he wants to put Kathy Burke in Room Lovely (as opposed to Room 101): "She's gutsy. If I was a woman, she'd be a definite role model for me. She shows that it's possible to be a woman without going all mincey and weird on you."
Anybody want to join me in imagining Stephen Fry as a woman? Modelled on Kathy Burke? With dialogue by Jonathan Harvey? Too mincey, too weird.
As David says, he and I spent the latter half of last night in the company of two big americans. If we'd had our wits about us, we might have worked out there was another Big there too...
Condolences to Rob on the death of his Mum (who sounds quite a character).
......previous entries