H.Cooper orginal

Ah yes, a nice bowl of fruit. Simple strong lines, bold use of colour, tactile blending to delineate light n' shade. A fine piece of work. In this age of formaldehyde sharks and dirty beds, it's good to see a return to the basic principles of art. Manchester is full of this sort of return to the basics thinking. Like drinking beer for instance. Why attend a Beer Festival, which may or may not be populated by the Scum of the Earth(TM), when you can sit on your own front patio and crush a few hundred cans into your face in the company of friends and family. Sure, if you're so inclined, you can nip down to your local and ram a few tequilas and aftershocks and some weird blue shite that no one could really identify down your neck. Then it's back home to a welcoming ten more beers before bed and chronic heart palpitations around four in the morning. Just the way to prepare for a wedding...

to be continued.

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Shine on

RIP Crazy Diamond.

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The Dark side of the Hyde

'Is there anybody out there?' Christ on a bike Roge, are you blind, there's fookin' thousands of us. We've all overcome our mass depression of an hour ago, purged all thorts of Ingerland from our minds, trudged a thousand miles from Notting Hill Gate, just to see you mate, knock off the rhetorical questions and break out the giant pig. Alas, Roger was too busy inflating his ego to inflate yon floaty pig, but we forgive him for that for yea, he is Roger of Waters and judging by the way the aging hippies in front of us waved their pudgy arms and shook their haggard follicles, he is a Rock God(TM) It gradually dawned on me the appeal of attending a Robbie or Kylie concert for the teenies and housewives; it really rocks to be able to sing all the words to practically everything at a gig. This would be a bit smug and irritating, were it not for the fact that everyone, as far as the eye could see, was singing word perfectly too.

Roger was on stage for the duration, and he and his trusty session musos performed a brace of Floyd classics with effortless glee. Except for a brief moment in the middle when he disappeared up his own rectum in search of his latest political opus, the profoundly named 'Leaving Beirut' I will let you discover the magic of this song for yourselves, I am unable to talk about it without losing control of my bladder. After a ten minute break while a crack medical team extracted Roge from his rectal passage, it was off to the Dark Side of the Moon for us. (No Spencer, not his moon)

This naturally, was brilliant. Every moment of that album was executed to perfection, every agonising wail of 'Great Gig in the Sky' every bang clang pip bong of 'Money'. Everything. The grizzled hippies were reaching nirvana by the time that final heartbeat palpitated off into the distance. I sang my garbled version of every song with such crazed gusto my lungs fair ached. Roger couldn't bare to leave it at that of course, and dashed back on to do 'Brick in the wall Part II' but it was fine, he didn't have to, we were full to the brim and anything more was just greedy. Roger, you earned your crust of bread that night. Ingerland, I want my money back.

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Brothers of the head

Nice to see Desparate Dan and Juju again, even if it meant we had to sit through some truly diabolical bands. 'Bush Guru', the reason for us being at the Clapham Grand on a Friday eve, were the best of the lot. This isn't praise by the way, as the rest of the acts were so utterly bland and formulaic, it didn't take much to rise above them. I'm not a fan of this sort of right-on 'Afrika the Muthaland is weeping' shite, but they were competent players and they did do a song called 'Bulawayo' which must count for something. It was all downhill from there as they were followed by a ghastly Nelly Furtado wannabee (that's 'I'm like a bird' Nelly, not sexed up, Timbaland trippin' 'Man-eater' Nelly) wearing a screaming yellow dress which looked like someone had detonated a cage of canaries into some cling film and wrapped her in the remains.

She was eventually dragged off the stage by some passing PETA activists, only to be replaced
by one of those bands who used to play during break in your school hall. You remember those utterly wet Christian Youth bands, wot had one of those cylindrical hand shaker things and a weird sort of clacker machine that used to randomly mulfunction when they artfully banged it against their pasty thighs. The earnest weenies used to gaze meaningfully down at their synchronistically tapping feet while their leader (who always looked like that Jane from childer telly classic 'Rainbow' ) beseeched us all to 'Caharrmm to ther Lorred.' Not sure why she had a quasi-americano accent, it being seventies Rhodesia n' all. Sheesh, if anything was to drive an impressionable yoof into the arms of Satan it was these people. But I digress. By this stage I was sufficiently numbed by cheap lager and Jazz cigarillos to venture across the Saturday Night Fever Flashing Coloured Disco Floor (TM) the like of which I haven't seen since Sarah's in Harare, with the intention of rudely heckling the God Squad. Lucky for them they dashed off into the wings and cunningly tagged with something even worse. The lead singer of the next crew came on in very nice white jeans and top to compliment her shiny blondeness, but for some mysterious reason, had decided to wear a fluffy white tutu on top of her jeans. This was one stylistic flourish too far, I begged for mercy and Juju n' DD graciously allowed me to escape from what was quite obviously 'Bad Band Hell'.

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Follow the light, the light will guide you

Fuerzabruta at the Roundhouse in Camden, is an Argentine production which perfectly suits the newly revamped home of crusty rock concerts of yore. The show traps its audience in a ring of curtains and herds them about in shuffling groups, their movements dictated by the action taking place overhead and all around them. As a treadmill barges in from a corner a lone spotlight picks out our everyman hero of the day, trudging endlessly towards death/epiphany as all manner of obstacles hurtle towards him (including some people who looked like they'd just stumbled off the platform at Chalk Farm station). This poor fella gets shot in the back but bravely soldiers on, runs like the clappers for a bit, gets bludgeoned by a wall of boxes, gets rained on, gets randomly bumped into by those rude tube people again, gets shot again, keeps going, holy shit, it's like a metaphor for, like, life! This is all laying it on a bit thick but fortunately he manages to run off before someone else shoots him (namely me). We are now surrounded again, only this time by a massive curtain of tinfoil. Two nimble young gels in flimsy frocks dash around at ceiling height across this billowing silver surface, like a human wall of death, rolling over each other and screaming like banshees. My metaphor gland struggles to process this bit, but gives up as we are once again shuffled around by frantic backstage crew all sporting elaborate head mics, in order to make way for what looks like a giant 50p piece that floats down into the middle of the space. On either side of this 'coin' are a man and a woman, who set up a rhythm by hurling themselves from side to side which sets the entire structure rotating madly. This has the knock on effect of driving them both utterly insane, and they jabber and hoot at the crowd like Tourettes infected howler monkeys. Is this the paradoxical dichotomy of man and woman, or has the cast been laying into BSE infected Argentine beef? We will never know as the 50p is whisked away and replaced by a swimming pool that covers the entire crowd. The floor of this pool is made of some indestructible transparent plastic allowing us to view four scantily clad women as they perform an x-rated Esther Williams piece in a garishly illuminated cascade of water. I find myself becoming oddly aroused by all this frolicking, and am somewhat disturbed when they lower the entire structure down to head height allowing the audience to prod and paw at the nubile bodies a mere membrane away from them. The odd idiot takes it too far and has to be chastised by the roaming stage crew, as the pool sails back up into the rafters and...oh no, it's that poor running sod again, forced back into action on his eternal treadmill, you vicious Argie bastards, let him be! I too am calmed by a circling crew person, who assures me the actor is extremely fit and has been doing the show for months, like that's supposed to make me feel better. The whole event peters out suddenly in a rather anticlimactic fashion and we find ourselves abandoned by cast and crew to make our way out or linger on the floor while their DJ bashed off (no Spencer, not that sort of bashing off) a few tribal choons to prepare us for the world outside. Anyone familiar with the work of Grotowski would know this sort of thing was all done with equal fervour in Poland in the fifties and sixties (don't want to come over all poncy like, it's a miracle I remember anything from four years of speech n' drama). I can't say I was utterly blown away by the whole thing, but I recommend people check it out, just for the spinning 50p and the nekkid chicas in the pool, which strangely enough made it all worthwhile!

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Rock, and the monsters thereof

When rocking hard on a sunny Saturday afternoon, one suddenly finds one's thorts turning to matters epicurean. Rocker and myself have up to this point been content to satiate ourselves with watered down Stella/Strongbow combos. Rockette however, is having none of this and disappears for two hours on a food mission. Queensryche have deeply underwhelmed us with their faux horror ways for what seems like years before Rockette reappears clutching this smorgasbord of delights. She demands we partake of the pudgy wedges of deep fried smash, dripping cornetto and extra hot watermelon, but Rocker's eyes are drawn to the freshly minted pack of Smoking Kills and the feisty Chablis. He hoovers up both in a matter of seconds and is sufficiently enervated to sing discordantly
along to 'Wheel in the Sky'; a Journey classic that has aging rockers as far as the eye can see, weeping into their skull mugs. The Milton Keynes Bowl is a gigantic grass amphitheatre which looks like the crater formed by some giant prehistoric meteorite bombardment. We gather our meagre belongings and head for the relative sanity of the grassy slopes in order to take in the crowd from a distance. By the time Alice Cooper comes on, we have become one with nature and can barely wave a lighter to 'Be my Frankenstein'. Rocker has turned a luminous shade of vermillion and has begun chanting in ancient Mesopotamian, I begin to wonder what was in the Chablis. The Sun mercifully retreats and Deep Purple take that as their cue to stomp on the last remaining synapses firing in the puddled remnants of our brains. I too have taken up chanting as it seems the only way to communicate with Rocker. Rockette has gone off to start up a bra fitting concession next to the veggie burger stand, as she says she's never seen such badly fitted bras in her life, and that's just the men. Finally, to the strains of 'Smoke...' we crawl towards the exit, hoping against hope Rockette is able to drive us back to our hotel without any verbal input from her men. Not one to ever let the party end, Rocker whistles up three tequilas, three brandies and three buds from the hotel bar, but this is the final straw for Rockette, who despairs of us and heads for bed. Eventually, and by eventually I mean after having the shut bar reopened to get us a cheeky baileys, Rocker calls it quits, no doubt collapsing like a felled Redwood as soon as he got to his room. I know I did.

Monsters of Rock, we did you proud.

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Heyyyy

Much shame on me for failing to populate this site for a while. Wanted to do something on Monsters of Rock, but felt horribly drained after the event due to excessive rawking and lost the will to live. Back from the brink, I will renew my blogging duties with new found enthusiasm, partially inspired by, of all things, the World Cup. Ah yes, this joyful opportunity for the Peoples of the World(TM) to come together and get trolleyed while wearing ludicrous facepaint and chanting footie songs of dubious degrees of pc-osity. Fair warms the cockles it does, especially when you pop down to the local Portuguese tavern in Stockwell to take in Brazil v Croatia, along with the odd Super Bok. Interesting to see that well known hero of the Portuguese Nation, Da Fonz, immortalised above the bar counter. Having his benign countenance looking down on us, well, it pushes my already overworked cocklemeter well into the red. I may just back blog on Monsters, if I can find a picture that accurately sums up the occasion, and doesn't feature horribly cremated metalheads, roasting in their Slayer - Decade of Aggression Tour t-shirts. Suckling pork anyone?

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Drawings

Always nice when someone I know, actually manages to extract digit from rectum and get something done. Herewith a link to tortured artist's exhibition opening night, taking place in sunny Bethnal Green on the 22nd of June.
The venue is the snooker hall below his rooftop flat, and it will be the art happening of the er, day.

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Les Boules Des Chiens

Banned twice, responsible for the deaths of 38 people, the deadly game of Boules has a checkered past indeed. So it was with some trepidation that I joined Au Savage and friends for the 'Boule D'or', a bare knuckle bout of ball hurling and piglet crushing which soon took its toll on us all. La Cicciolina of the ladies team was the first to fall, suffering a vicious ankle injury which sorely hampered her usually stellar form. Having observed her discreetly from behind a bench, I cunningly mimicked her elegant stance and added a few stylistic flourishes of my own. The final look was what I'd call 'la teapot petit'; one hand behind the back for balance, the ball hand extending trunk-like ahead of the body, boule cupped downwards in the palm to facilitate back spin. While this may sound fairly ridiculous to observe, I'm confidant I blended into the crowd, as all around me were crouchers, danglers, mincers and swashers of varying degrees of skill (including my own team mates, like the gurner pictured here). Having made short work of the ladies, Team Chien took on two other crews, but sadly choked in both games and carelessly tossed away their chance for glory. Probably just as well, as the pub was growing more alluring by the second and our enthusiasm waning horribly. Needless to say, a jolly time was had by all. I must also take this opportunity to point out that the ham rolls were most delicious and without a doubt saved the day, ahem! I did notice on Sunday morning however, an unfamiliar aching in my left tricep which has now been diagnosed as 'boule arm'. This severe affliction adds to the historical litany of pain and disaster that haunts this game. I just hope I'm able to lift a glass again, otherwise the cheese eating surrender monkeys will be hearing from my lawyers.

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Yes, a dog, in a window

Every blog needs a dog. Here's mine. Oh alright, it's a flimsy premise for a post, but I'm under pressure here and I like this dog's face. It was extremely unfazed by my attention and didn't move an inch as I pranced around its portal (No Spencer, not that portal). Why this creature was resting in the window of a carpeting store, I know not. Perhaps, this is how they entice custom in Manchester. Perhaps it's a sort of interactive thing; you get to see how easily dog hair comes off their fancy carpeting right before your very eyes. Perhaps it is an extremely high-tech animatronic security camera and if I'd lingered for a second longer, its eyes would have emitted an intense beam of concentrated light which would have cut me in half. Perhaps I have watched one too many episodes of Battlestar Galactica Season II in a row.

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That warm feeling

Sunday afternoon, 6.30pm. Sigh9 and myself board the Northern line towards Bank and ultimately Liverpool St, our destination, the grammatically challenged Gramaphone. We quickly realise, along with our more compos mentis fellow travellers, that there is a curious river of liquid running along the floor. All eyes quickly turn to the gentleman in the corner, and the remarkable stream of urine cascading forth from his jeans. Anyone who has ever relieved themselves in the ocean or the school pool, knows the iniquitous delight of pissing in their pants (God Forbid I'd every promote such behaviour, ahem.) Sadly this man was too far gone to appreciate the warm primal glow of the voluntary soiler. He probably awoke to a chilled crotch and the gentle ministrations of the London underground staff, hurling him into the street. We took this as a sign to keep our beer consumption within reasonable limits and went on to enjoy some hearty Teutonic banging (No Spencer, not that sort of Teutonic banging) care of Marcus Hartmann (The Siamese twin with the chiselled cheek bones) from Pulsar Records in Berlin. At the end of the evening, as a special treat, la Sonje led Strcprstskrzkrk and myself a merry dance around the city streets in search of that holy grail of bus routes 'The 35'. Naturally we failed dismally in this quest and found instead a series of small walls knocked up by some Romans or something. Two days later we got home just in time to miss 1st look 'Lost', nice. Ah well, apart from the minor detour around London's tourist hotspots, a very successful outing indeed. I come over all warm just thinking about it.

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God is watching

As depictions of Christ go, this has to be my favourite. There's a particular quality to his sightless stare that wavers between the benign and the malevolent. Just the sort of look you'd expect to get from your Deity of choice. No open arms, no suppurating palms and flowing locks, this guy's got his eye on you and you'd better prepare yourself for judgement. This bizarre sculpture lurks at the back of St Micheal's (I think it was) in Highgate, taken with my first camera phone, the hefty Nokia 7650. He vaguely reminds me of Gort (who also rocked a particularly swish silver speedo, which I wouldn't mind seeing Our Lord and Saviour sporting at the next reading of the Magnificat) That's probably why I like this so much. It brings a much needed robotic nuance to the whole Son of God(TM) thing.

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Phew

What a relief, a luverly pair of daffs. Don't get more jolly than that. Rinse your minds of previous horrors, bask in the glory of these humble horns.

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No Spencer, not that sort of horn

Craterface

The scorched earth landscape of my skin, ravaged by the twin terrors of African sunlight and chronic acne.

Kids, wear hats in Summer. Not much you can do about acne though. They say there's no link between acne and genetics, I hope not for my child's sake.

That's the problem with having a camera you can turn around and point at yourself. You get tempted to go for the close up. You shouldn't see the inside of your body and you shouldn't see your skin close up.

Ah well, next time I will post a picture of a flower, this is all gone a bit noir. Still, phone cameras, you can't knock em.

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Au Naturel

The Peak District is a hotbed of depravity and salacious behaviour as any fule kno. You can't move without stumbling into the Devil's Arse or coming across priapic pagans, mashing exotic mushrooms into their faces and prancing around obscene outcrops of ice age rockery in the altogether. While the rest of my earnest group of budding landscape photographers were fiddling with their f.stops and peering into the haze to capture the definitive shot of a wall, a tree and a sheep, my eyes were strangely drawn to the rocks and their saucy ways. The Roaches are the Peak's slightly inferior answer to the The Matopos and would be lovely if they weren't covered in the blood of failed rock climbers and suicidal sheep. After Peaking for four days it was nice to come down to the relative sanity of Manchester and the questionable sanity of the relatives. Nothing like a rousing game of full body contact netball to get the blood racing (out of various gaping wounds). I'm particularly grateful for being included in the ancient family tradition of cremating the dried out Christmas tree at the first Barbie of the Summer(TM). I'm sure those burn marks on the second floor will disappear with a lick o' paint and the neighbours weren't too alarmed by the six foot column of fire randomly whooshing up over the fence. I also thoroughly enjoyed the loving exchange of cups of water in the face between two of the brothers, a curious way to express one's affection some might say, but who am I to question familial customs.

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Self Plate-rait

The Kitchen of La Belle Sonje. It's yellow, it has plates, what more do you want.

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N for Nawtee

No, I haven't gone all corporate or received a vast sponsorship deal from a certain network operator named after a fruit that isn't an apple (though I'm more than happy to sell-out if the bunce is nawtee enough). This picture, taken in the aforementioned network operator's reception area, demonstrates the impressive capabilities of my Nokia N90's onboard camera. OK, so I'll be the first to admit this is a bit sad, banging on about one's new mobile phone, especially when one works for the creator of the operating system, lurking within the innards of said phone. I didn't want to post anything but sigh9 forced my hand by drawing a wee picture demanding succour. So there, you happy now? You've forced me into branding my blog with advertising tat. Not that I really follow this new campaign for the fruit related net-ops. They seem to have taken a rather random group of animals, a raccoon, a panther, a canary and a dolphin, to represent their new mobile packages. No doubt intensive marketing reasearch was done to determine which animals mankind felt the greatest affinity with. A dolphin makes sense, free to roam, man's aquatic best friend, higher brain function, tuna friendly etc. A panther is almost acceptable. You could get off on being a panther, prowling the wilderness, befriending abandoned children and bears, maiming campers, lotta fun, lotta fun. I'm not so sure about the canary. Many's the time I've enviously eyed that weird piece of cuttlefish in a canary's cage and wished I could be the little feathered fella for a few minutes, just so I could rub my beak against that strange bio-ceramic carapace. I'm not sure anyone else on the planet shares this view though. As far as a racoon is concerned however, no one in their right mind wants to be a raccoon. They may be mildly endearing in a ring tailed bandit masked kind of way, but it never really works out well for their kind. Raccoons either become roadkill or hats, or dubious ad campaigns. If given the choice, I'd take the pantechnicon any day.

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Damn, knew I should have finished reading the paper on Saturday, I might have read the Zoe Williams piece on the same subject, ah well, great minds n' all. Nice spot Strcprstsk

Not a drop to drink

Growing up in a country which seemed to be perpetually in the throes of devastating drought, it's a tad depressing to sit on a grey, miserable, rainy island and have to endure it all again. Though admittedly, 'endure' is laying it on a bit thick, as no-one has yet suggested we put a brick in our cisterns or pour the bathwater into the loo (if we should be so reckless as to have a bath in the first place). However, Red Ken has advised we don't flush if we've 'Just had a pee'. Cheers Ken, that's the sort of cutting edge conservational thinking a crisis like this demands. It's the kind of insightful thort which makes this toilet notice in the pub I visited last night, all the more amusing. The Water Poet (it just gets better and better) has had water gushing up through the floor in the Mens for weeks, despite endless appeals to Ken's plucky crew of divinators at Thames Water. Luckily I have no grass to be banned from quenching with either hosepipe or sprinkler. The bedraggled Plant of No discernable Identity(TM) in my kitchen, seems to get by on a pint of the clear stuff every six weeks/when I remember. I hardly water my rubber plant at all and it's rapidly taking over the dining room and will soon require some brutal trimming with a machete. I know too well, the grief a person can suffer by growing overly attached to houseplants and indeed, fauna in general. My Mother rashly returned to the Zimbabwean homestead she was forced to abandon last June, only to discover that the year she leaves, the country is drowned by torrential rain. After endless seasons of futile drought busting (roaming four + acres with buckets of bathwater) she found her pride and joy transformed into the Island of Dr. Moreau, though fortunately without Marlon Brando in a sheet, lurking in the undergrowth.

All this drama, and Summer hasn't even begun, I dread to think what the Nation's mood will be mid-August, when they're all onto their third layer of skin and temperatures are 'Soaring' into the twenties. At least my rubber plant will be happy.

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The house always wins

One of the most alluring and infuriating sounds in the universe is the distinctive 'tiddlipoodlitiddlipoodli' of the modern slot machine. It calls to you from every single corner of Vegas, from the airport lounge to the petrol station rest-rooms, there is no escaping its insidious siren song. I hear it tiddling in my mind as I attempt to fight jetlag in my ridiculously large hotel room. I've exhausted the joy of the electric curtains, the telly in the bathroom and the childish, though strangely satisfying action of lifting up the jelly babies, then replacing them just before sixty seconds is up and you automatically get charged for the stupid things. My superb blag/v.important high level meeting in America's own Sodom and Gomorrah, has sadly failed to alter my fortunes (other than for the worse) though it has had a detrimental affect on my waistline. In this town, the carnivorous lard eater is King. The rare vegetables that accidently make it to your plate, huddle in the corner, crowded out and humiliated by the bloodied haunch of cow that takes centre stage. Promenading down the strip, I encountered this other famous carnivore. When I suggested to an awestruck out-of-towner that they should cut the top half of Roy's head off just for the sake of continuity, he looked at me like I'd shat on his golden calf and stomped off into some plastic vegetation. Me and my crazeee limey humour.

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The finger through my throat

At four in the morning, the Red Room begins to throb. The coalescence of sound and light, leaves tangible arcs of matter suspended in the air around us. These ephemeral creatures take hours to dissipate and dance on our retinas for days afterwards. We hang from our bottles of Fink as if they've been cemented in space, and we've snagged on them accidentally like so many novelty balloons caught in the rafters of Waterloo Station. There is only one law that propels us, the Old Law, our private mantra - One Song-One Song. He follows her then it's him then it's me, the genre simple enough to define. I call it electrotechnohiphoptwostepdubstepdancehallgrimeandthattunehemadeonabletonlive.

Strcprstskrskrk, it's your song.

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