Oik

 

Last week, Boris Johnson saved a woman who was being mugged by 12-year-old girls wearing the obligatory ‘hoodies’ and wielding an iron bar.

The girls just stood there until the woman told them “He’s the Mayor of London” at which point they ran away. Who knew the trappings of office still held such power?

Boris, or as the muggee referred to him “my knight on a shining bicycle”, chased after them, calling them “oiks”.

Oiks? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s an informal noun meaning an uncouth or obnoxious person. Fair enough, except it’s a word that would feel more at home uttered by one Nigel Molesworth (pictured above) in the 1950s setting of St Custards than on the streets of Camden. I can’t believe the girls had ever heard the word uttered before.

So very Boris.

Word-ahzh

Finally got round to listening to episode 7 of Boys for Noise, the excellent podcast by Ingmar and Billy, two gay guys from Melbourne who “are into music, art, movies, popular culture and all that stuff. And they like to go on about it. And they like to listen to each other go on about it. Now you can too!”

Don’t be put off by the highbrow sounding list of topics, we’re talking Beyonce and Project Runway here. And with the mysterious Debbie replenishing their wine glasses as they rabbit on, it’s all most entertaining.

Anyhoo, in episode 7, both Gym Class and Wordage get a namecheck. And whereas I’ve always thought of the last syllable of Wordage as being like the last syllable of porridge, they give me an undeserved veneer of sophistication and glamour by making it like the last syllable of ‘Even Rocky had a montage’.

Before casually writing me off as being ‘too old for boyfriend material’.

Swings and roundabouts, as the saying has it.

No November

If you’re wondering why are so many no’s in the above flyer, cast your mind back to a certain nineties Eurotrash dance number…

It’s for monthly night Kiss & Make Up, which we attended on Friday night. A fair amount of lager and bourbon was consumed, we swapped Little Chef experiences with Stuart, one of the not-so-evil masterminds behind the night, Steven got “beard envy” after meeting some of the bear-ier gentlemen present, and as promised there were “spontaneous outbreaks of dancing”.

The next morning we were slightly worse for wear and headed down to our local greasy spoon. There we had a breakfast that in Steven’s words, left us “equally disgusted and delighted”.

The rest of Saturday consisted of Working Girl, Revenge of the Sith and X Factor. Each of which attained that same delicate balance between disgust and delight.

Hubby Hubby

Ben & Jerry, purveyors of ice cream and liberal sentiments, have managed the neat trick of coming out (so to speak) in favour of gay marriage just by deleting a single letter. Their Chubby Hubby flavour has been renamed Hubby Hubby in their home state of Vermont for the month of September, the first month that same-sex marriages are taking place there.

As a Hubby with a Hubby myself (we have civil partnerships rather than marriages over here, but it’s all the same to us), I really believe that the existence of officially recognised ceremonies helps gay and lesbian relationships become more widely accepted.

Walt Freese, the CEO of Ben & Jerry’s, says Vermont’s same-sex marriages are “something worth celebrating with peace, love - and plenty of ice-cream.”

I’ll raise a scoop to that.

Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space

I’m not sure I really approve of the fad for bands to do gigs (well, probably concerts actually, as they tend to come with a ‘we are serious musicians’ attitude) consisting of all the songs from one of their albums in the right order.

But when I found out that Spiritualized were going to give ‘Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space’ a live spin, it only took me a couple of seconds to get over myself and snap up a couple of tickets.

The album came out in 1997, when me and my friend Nicki were sharing the tiniest of flats in a beautiful white-pillared street in Notting Hill. We painted the walls a cheery yellow and our old college friends would come and hang out in our miniscule living room under the Wong Kar-Wai poster (“The world’s most exciting film maker”). We’d thrill to the crazy new sounds of Radiohead’s OK Computer and chill to the blissed out world of Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space. It had been a good few years since we’d left university, and here we all were again – only now in London! With jobs! And money! And nice clothes! Going to cool bars! And clubs! In London! I still sometimes get a thrill from just being in London, but back then I got it a lot more.

In fact it was during that time that the inevitable cracks in our cosy circle of friends finally started to appear. Tensions and fallouts and schisms that I wasn’t directly involved in, but that freaked me out nonetheless, though in hindsight it’s all for the best that we transformed from a single many-headed organism into a collection of individuals. And for me the album remains associated with the happy bit just before all that.

So tonight I decided to dig it out and stick it on the iTunes so me and it could get reacquainted. And it’s impossible to do that without taking a minute to admire the packaging.

The whole thing is done as if it’s a pack of medicine. I didn’t splash out on the deluxe version pictured above in which each track is on a different CD, sorry tablet, in a giant blister pack. Instead I got the next version down which had just the one tablet in the one blister. Inside was a medicinal-looking leaflet with details of the contents (track listing), active ingredients (band members) and a whole host of other information (What is Spiritualized used for? Spiritualized is used to treat the heart and soul.) You can read the whole thing here.

Every detail has been obsessed over by design studio Farrow until it’s spine-tinglingly perfect. They even released this photo to show that it had been packaged under ’strict pharmaceutical conditions’ (though I reckon her nails should be a bit shorter if so). My favourite bit of verbiage is on the back of the box: ‘For aural administration only’.

Refresh, reboot and other ‘re’ words

So it turns out that the film studios aren’t the only ones going in for a spot of rebooting. My attention has just been drawn to an art piece called ‘Refresh‘. In 2007, an artist by the name of Kristin Lucas changed her name to… Kristin Lucas. According to the court transcript, she told the judge:

“Your honor, I am here for a refresh. A renewal of self… I am prepared to let go. To empty my cache. To refill the screen with the same information. To reboot…”

After two weeks of spending “probably way too much time thinking about this situation”, the judge granted her request, stating: “So you have changed your name to exactly what it was before in the spirit of refreshing yourself as though you were a web page.”

Cool.

(via Guerilla Innovation)

Rebooted

About a year ago, I received an email from a poncey New York hotel chain alerting me to the news that one of their hotels had been “reimagined” by a designer with a European sounding name. Brilliant. How much classier it sounded than a mere redesign. And it wasn’t just the hotel people that were at it – movie folk soon realised that reimagining a film sounded less of a cop-out than just remaking it.

This year, that’s all changed. Film studios have ditched the flair of reimagination and are now “rebooting” film franchises instead. I quite like this too. “OK,” it seems to admit, “perhaps we went overboard with the tenth, eleventh and twelfth films in the series. But be assured that we have now realised the error of our ways, gone back to basics and actually put something like a proper plot in this one.”

And how do I know of this latest term? Because I managed to score a couple of last-minute tickets to Movie Con II, a somewhat unholy alliance between Empire and the BFI. Steven and I spent last weekend geeking out to film clips from a bunch of upcoming films as well as Q&As with some of the directors.

Normally, such an event would have me twittering, or tweeting if you prefer, like crazy. But because of an anti-piracy ban on phones, I found myself deprived of my addiction. So like a true addict, I found a way round it.

Welcome to the world of paper tweets. (Click to embiggen.)

Like the waves down on the beach

Sunday morning, turn on the radio. The Doors are playing and I am instantly transported back to my student days, hanging out in packs on Bristol streets, messing around in parks on  sunny days, counting out coins for another round in tiny crowded pubs, lying in the living rooms of dilapidated Victorian houses late at night having stupid conversations by candlelight, sagging sofas hidden under patterned fabrics, film posters blue-tacked to peeling wallpaper, and music, always music, a fourth dimension to the large messy rooms, music you could float away on, Massive Attack, The Cure, Talk Talk,  The Doors. “Cars hiss by my window” Jim Morrison intoned in my favourite Doors song, “like the waves down on the beach.” I loved that line back then, the collision between the natural and the man-made, the soothing and the restless.

The song ends and I am returned, unharmed, to the present. I smile briefly and carry on making coffee.

Tidy

A groovy young man just told me my trainers were ‘tidy’.

I must have done the laces up nicely this morning.

Kiss & Fly

At Luxembourg airport, you can park for half an hour free of charge. They could have called it the Drop Off. They could have called it Meet & Greet. But instead they’ve called it Kiss & Fly. I love it. So cute. It cuts through all the boring stuff about flying to the bit that really matters.

We were in Luxembourg for Colophon, a magazine conference. Or to be more exact, Steven was in Luxembourg for Colophon, launching issue 02 of Gym Class, and I was tagging along for the ride.

So while Steven did the conference thing, I sat in cafes, shopped and wandered round the Old Town. When I’d done all that, I jumped on one of those bikes you can pick up anywhere like in Paris and rode on over to the sci-fi surroundings of the European zone. (I wandered into the Philarmonie during the interval of a lunchtime concert and snapped this photo.)

I did hop on the Colophon train for one event – the Kasino A4 party in the tiny Grayscale Bar. They served ‘black and white’ drinks – clear shots when the lights were on, and dark shots in the periods when they decided to turn the lights off. Those crazy Finns. It was fun.