Wednesday, August 24, 2005

London, Moving House etc.

OK, so we have actually moved into Phil and Cath's lush house in Uplands complete with several hundred bin bags of washing and various boxes of folders stuffed with utterly pointless notes. We also have a flashing police light and cuddly Pikachu which I won in a raffle a couple of days ago.

The London trip was a lot of fun and the Gallo gig was great because the tracks from the album sounded amazing with a band backing them and Theresa, the heavily pregnant female vocalist/drummer also had a really beautiful voice. The only downer was waiting two hours for the band to arrive only to go on to play a 10 song set which literally only lasted about an hour.
Somehow it didn't seem to matter at the time, which is possibly because I managed to elbow a barrage of Japanese girls out of the way to get an autograph from Vincent who had a sexy modern Elvis thing going on complete with powder blue and white leather jacket and shiny white cowboy boots.

When we left Koko - a very beautiful and red converted theatre in which by London standards, drinks aren't actually all that expensive - we headed for a bar in Camden and I bonded with a weird American girl (Kelly I think) over a fetish for liquorice rizzlas. She had a strange fringe and an even stranger voice, also she moved kind of bizarrely but I was wasted by this point and keen to talk to any weirdo - except Pete Docherty who was sat on the table opposite looking like the jerk he is and trying to blag free drinks from any kid desperate enough to talk to him (and believe me there were quite a few). The night was quite fun until Alex's mate Jof decided to tell Kelly's sister she looked like a mentally challenged fish and then things took a turn for the worse. Well actually nothing really happened apart from a few feeble displays of male testosterone and boredom setting in before bedtime.

Next day I met a sweet girl who lives with Tom and freelances for a Polish newspaper in London, spent a tenner on a leather jacket from the Stables market, and went record shopping. In Select-A-Disk I was looking at Beach Boys CDs when this guy came up to me and offered me a job as a creative writing assistant editor for Bloomsbury. It was very strange.

A new boy has moved into our old Mumbles house -
His name is David, he is Italian and likes Iron Maiden, Savatage and numerous other cheesy old school metal bands. He plays guitar in a band called 'Blazing Steel'. Check out www.nightcloud.net which is his bass player/singer's other band. They're huge in Italy.


Monday, August 15, 2005

Vincent Gallo.



I seriously cannot wait for this and have been listening to When on repeat and checking out
articles on http://www.galloappreciation.com/ (BB Gun Magazine one is particularly good) and band stuff on www.drowninginbrown.com. This site is really interesting because you can look around Gallo's home music studio and check out his recording equpiment, instruments and vintage hi-fi stuff. Cool, eh?


Still holding out for the discovery of an elusive recording from the band Gray whose founding members included Vincent Gallo and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Although they played several gigs at the Mudd Club in the late 70s/early 80s apparently no recordings were ever made.
I'm also dying to hear evidence of Gallo's brief foray into hip-hop as half of Prince Vince and DJ High Priest. That really must have been something.

Friday, August 12, 2005

Biscotti or the Bomb

Whilst shopping in town for biscotti ingredients there was a bomb scare in the Quadrant and rumours of a second 'bomb' behind Wilkinsons. The police took the precaution of sectioning off this area and stopped buses from running from the Quadrant thereby creating havoc in Swansea city centre as people rushed around in a panic desperately attempting to flag down the Number 2 to Newton from the middle of the Kingsway. Eventually they resumed normal service having realised that the whole fiasco was just a false alarm.
This reminded me of a similar incident in Hereford city centre a few years ago when a suspcious looking device was found on the train station platform and was subsequently blown up by the army; it turned out to be a homemade guitar pedal which was a Cathedral School pupil's GCSE technology project.
Better safe than sorry.

Now for the biscotti which turned out brilliantly and I'm really not much of a baker.
This recipe was nicked from An American Mama in Berlin although I used Green and Blacks Organic Dark chocolate and stuck with the pine nuts.
http://www.berlinmama.blogspot.com/

Anything Goes Biscotti
1 egg
100 g powdered sugar
vanilla (use your best judgement here - I think a teaspoon or two would do)
50 g chopped almonds, toasted (hazelnuts, walnuts, your husband's nuts...they all work fine here)
50 g good dark chocolate (get fancy here, guys - lindt, imported real American chocolate chips, etc.)
50 g pinenuts (this is where you can get creative, and frankly i would recommend that as opposed to pinenuts, which just sound downright nasty. so get funky! use studentenfutter - i think that is trail mix in english even though it sounds like it should be hamster pellets, or some museli, raisins, whatever)
125 g flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon baking powder


Method:
  1. Shape batter into a loaf formation in the bottom of a greased baking tray (don't freak out if there doesn't seem to be much moisture as the egg is really all you need to bind the ingredients).
  2. Bake 25 mins at 200C or gas mark 6
  3. Cut into slices and bake for 10-15 mins longer.
  4. Sit back and relax, maybe watch an episode of Seinfeld whilst the biscotti cools and hardens.

Enjoy - this biscotti is the bomb!

Monday, August 08, 2005

Porn Star Names

Everyone knows how to do this anyway but I just realised that I worked mine out wrong, thinking Polly the fairground goldfish with fin rot was my first pet and forgetting all about the tri-colour guinea pig I had when I was six which changes things somewhat.

You take the name of your first pet and add your mother's maiden name to it ...

LUCKY BISHOP is born.

Al's is unbelievably good:

RUMPY HUNT !!!!

Hot Hot Hot

Still haven't managed to get any work done due to a combination of pure laziness and the fact that the library is always so damn hot.
It's like a sauna in here.
Also the Postgraduate section is even worse despite the big fan in there which only seems to circulate the warm air.
Really beginning to miss having a TV since the licence expired and it got hauled away. Only have Seinfeld and Family Guy to keep me amused and I can feel the brain cells rapidly dying off as a consequence.