Battleship Potemkin

I don't like giving bad reviews. I feel horrible about it. Most of the time, I enjoy gigs, plays and restaurants, because I'm pretty easily pleased. The rest of the time, I just don't talk about them. However, this week I actually managed to have a restaurant experience so bad that I feel the need to write about it as a warning - as well as the mutiny we did, for my first time ever, stage at the restaurant. I doubt the Soviets would have approved of this as much as of the actual uprising.

It all started so well, at Potemkin, a Russian restaurant in Clerkenwell, to celebrate a friend's birthday. The promise of 108 different types of vodka was alluring, and indeed proved to be true:

Does that vodka menu look a bit odd to you? We were told that all their prices had gone up (in a recession? with a VAT cut?) and that a couple of the menus had been marked up with the new prices, but not all. Those of us without writing all over the menus would have to consult with others, or, er, guess what price we'd be charged. I'm not sure that's legal under Trading Standards. Possibly a sign of things to come.

In essence, to make your party of a dozen celebrants happy enough to spend lots of money in your establishment, I would recommend that you, dear restaurant owner, do not:

• Agree a set menu over the phone when making the reservation then decide that only "a few" of us could actually have it;
• Take half an hour to come and take our order;
• Take another forty five minutes on top of that to bring our first drinks (if we hadn't seen the menu we would have lost faith in there being any vodka at all by this point, let alone 140 kinds);
• Take even longer than that to bring our starters, whilst other tables around us arrived, ordered and pretty much got through three courses;
• Ignore our repeated reminders that we had a set time to leave (which we delayed once for your convenience when it became clear even the starters weren't going to make it by then);
• Despite our order being made first, sell out a main course dish to all the other tables so suddenly there was none left for us, especially if you only bother to mention this and ask for alternative choices about ten minutes before we really, really had to leave, thus demonstrating that the mains weren't even in the oven yet; and/or (but definitely not and)
• Be extremely surly all the way through.

We left. It was just too frustrating for words. Many jokes were made by us about queuing and the stereotypical food shortages... Anyway, we walked out, which I've never done before. It was a shame, because the starters were actually very good, but we had no hope whatsoever of getting the rest of our meal in time to do anything else that night, and we weren't even getting drunk in the process.

We ended up in, horrors, Kentucky Fried Chicken. I don't think I'd been in one before. Actually, it wasn't too bad because the thing I ate bore some resemblance to an actual piece of chicken (although most certainly not free range) and certainly more edible than my place mat and cutlery at Potemkin. Best of all, it was in my hands about thirty seconds after I'd ordered. Magic! Demons!

Thus actually fed, where was this place we were in such a hurry to get to? Karaoke! More particularly, Karaoke Box by Smithfield Market. This was awesome fun. I'm a terrible singer but I do know the words to an awful lot of songs, and I'm a complete exhibitionist who always wanted to be a rock star. Even stone-cold sober, it's difficult to get me to give up the microphone to save the eardrums of everybody else. Luckily Karaoke Box rent you your own private room to do this in so as not to inflict the likes of me on the rest of the punters (and additional benefits of your own computer with 8,000 and waitress service). Here's our gang giving it large to Dancing Queen in our little room:

I had the dignity to sit that one out because I absolutely hate bloody Abba. What did I sing? Well, I rocked Depeche Mode's awesome Personal Jesus. That's a good one to chant along to, if you know the song well enough to avoid coming in at the wrong place.

We had a group mosh to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, just like in my teenage clubbing days. At least I was wearing flat boots for all that hardcore bouncing.

But the highlight of the night? The cod-Welsh singalong to Goldie Lookin' Chain's Your Mother's Got A Penis, which almost caused me to wet myself with laughter.

"Don't come back in huur!" As the owners of Potemkin might say, and we won't.

Dulli's-ville

That title is a bit of a misnomer. Last night we went to see Greg Dulli, ex-lead singer of the Afghan Whigs and currently of the Twilight Singers, in a collaboration he's doing at the moment with Mark Lanegan, ex-lead singer of Screaming Trees and occasionally of Queens of the Stone Age. These two are now writing together as The Gutter Twins. I've been a fan of Greg Dulli's work for years, since buying "1965" by the Afghan Whigs back in 1998 on the strength of a review in Q magazine extolling its darky, gothy, highly sexual, New Orleans-inspired feel (I can't find the Q review online so here's the one from Rolling Stone). I introduced it to the boyfriend as soon as we got together and he bought me one of their other albums for Valentine's Day a couple of weeks later. Aaah. Mark Lanegan, however, was a bit of an unknown to me - for some reason I've never really listened to Screaming Trees - which is why I said we went to see Greg Dulli.

It certainly wasn't dull. The two of them have very different voices: Mark Lanegan's is very deep, absolutely controlled, and with huge range; Greg Dulli's is more of a charged yelp across the high notes. Together, they work really well. It was a great concert, and I am now going to have to find a copy of their album together, and some of Mark's stuff.

That photo isn't very good as they were strictly enforcing no flash photography. I'd never use flash in that situation anyway (in fact, hardly ever in any circumstances) as all you do is illuminate the head of the person in front of you and irritate everybody around, but the stewards were generally unhappy about anyone whipping out a camera. After what happened to Eddie Vedder last year (even the first few seconds should give you the idea), I'm not surprised bands are cracking down on this. But during the interval I got a slightly better photo of the venue, the stupendous Union Chapel in Islington:

It's even more stunning in person, when your eyes can pick out the octagonal chamber and old wooden pews by candlelight. This is what churches should be for.

Other than that, life is in a state of flux... I won't say any more but I am waiting for news, something good, but it's boring to wait. I've been distracting myself with the Leyburn socks KAL. Here they are:

The other foot is coming along too.

I've also been amusing myself by spotting these signs around London which I'm sure the lsg crew on Ravelry will enjoy. Yes, yes, the company's actually called ISG, not LSG, but it looks that way with the oh-so-trendy mixed upper- and lower-case.

Back to the pretty socks and a pile of DVDs...

Swap Joy, even for Bees

My Rubberswap Redux swap package arrived today, hooray! It is from the fabulous Lisa B of Lisabeedesigns. It actually arrived yesterday but the postie had to leave a card through the door. I wasn't sure if it would be ready for collection at the sorting office yet, but I couldn't wait, and it was a lovely, sunny morning (for a change) for the walk so I chanced it, and the knitting gods smiled upon me.

Because it was sunny, with decent light for photography, I decided to open it in the garden with my camera. This was a mistake, as will become clear.

First layer unwrapped - I thoroughly approve of recycling boxes, for both economical and environmental reasons, so you are a girl after my own heart, Lisa. I send most of my packages out in boxes from something else. Hotel Chocolat are, incidentally, an excellent source of useful, small boxes for this type of thing.

Opening the box, I found a lovely note which I read with great excitement.


Unfortunately, as I was doing so, a visitor arrived. A honeybee. Actually, I'm assuming it arrived, rather than being in the box already. This is Lisabeedesigns, after all. I did even joke on the thread in RR that my partner shouldn't send me a boxful of live bees because they are an illegal import at UK Customs because of nasty bee diseases... Surely not? No, I'm pretty sure I saw it land. It wandered over the tissue paper for a bit:

Then disappeared into the depths of the box. Oh dear.

I can't remember if I've mentioned it before, but I have a horrible phobia of wasps. I'm slightly more comfortable around honeybees, but I would hardly say I was keen on them. Worse still, by this point a furious buzzing was emanating from the box. I wasn't entirely happy about putting my hand in there. I whacked the box a couple of times with a stick, to try to frighten it out, but no bee emerged. Shit.

Dilemma: leave the box until later, or proceed with opening? I didn't really want to leave it as I wouldn't have known whether or not the bee was still in there. The boyfriend, who used to work with honeybees and therefore has little fear of them, was off climbing so not around to save me, and anyway, how pathetic and girly would that be? Besides, all he would do to remove the bee would be to upend the box and steal my joy of unpacking it. I decided to be brave. I extracted the contents gingerly (ha) using the big scissors I'd had on hand for unwrapping to pick things up.

On the top, a "Ravel Mix" CD burned by Lisa of music she thought I'd like, based on my Amazon wishlist. This is so cool, and shows such thoughtfulness that I really am humbled.

Pretty yarns! There's some yummy Andean Treasure baby alpaca from Knitpicks, always great to receive here in the UK. Then there are some truly gorgeous yarns from Lisa's local Dancing Leaf Farm in Maryland, beautiful! I am guessing from the website that the bigger one is Rhumba organic worsted-weight merino in the Briar Patch colourway, and the smaller one is Salsa DK-weight mohair/wool in Purple Passion. They are really, really nice.

On the food front, Hard Times Chili spice mix (mmm!) from Texas and Lake Champlain Hazelnut Praline dark chocolate (double mmm!) from Vermont. These will go down very well indeed.

Cute little fingerpuppets of a girl and a chicken, lovely bamboo needles with pink balls on the end, and a beautiful notebook with birds on the front. You all know how much I like things with birds on the front.

Having removed most of the stuff, I discovered what the bee was after (crap photo as I was too scared to check the focus):

Gorgeous soap samples from Alchemic Muse, as I'd mentioned on my questionnaire that I'd like inspiration for my own soap-making. The bee had made, er, a bee-line for the Brier Rose-scented one. I think this is very telling on how proper essential oils (like Alchemic Muse use, and so do I) absolutely kick the arses of synthetic fragrance oils. The bee must have thought that summer was here, and it wanted it. Really wanted it. I did feel a bit sorry for the bee - it was quite groggy with the cold and lacking energy from no food all winter, and it must have thought that the wonderful rose scent meant nectar. And it's not as if honeybees are doing very well at the moment. However, this one wasn't going to survive long by waking up in January anyway. I eventually managed to shake it off onto the lawn so that I could get at my soap:

Thank you so much Lisa, it's all bee-rilliant!

Post-Christmas Greetings

On Boxing Day evening, I hope this finds all of you slowly emerging from your gluttonous turkey-induced slumbers, dragging your way out of piles of wrapping paper, and wondering what the hell to do in this slightly boring bit of the year between Christmas and New Year. It's not quite time to be doing anything useful or indeed anything that would require resolutions, like tidying the house or hitting the gym; those are what January is for. No, what this period seems to be for is watching the telly.

As I don't do the evil television, instead I will make you a present of some knitting-related videos. Can you tell I just worked out how to embed YouTube videos in my post the other day?

Firstly, and this is the one I would really recommend watching, a knitted music video by French-Canadian pop duo Tricot Machine. Yes, the name of their band is "knitting machine" in French. Apart from that, the song, "Les Peaux de Lièvres" is ethereal and lovely. I am a complete sucker for French pop, and piano-driven songs, and this is both, and gorgeous.

Isn't that wonderful? Effectively a knitted flick book. You can see as the camera is zoomed out at the start and end there are numbers on the knitted sheets which are presumably frames, just over 700 of them. Amazing. Their other songs are pretty good and I may be using my Christmas Amazon voucher from the future in-laws for their album.

Much less pretty, but fun nevertheless, another music video made of knitting. "Walkie Talkie Man" by Steriogram. It's probably a good thing that sound recording doesn't really involve that much yarn - the music would be all muffled.

Not music, this one's an art installation. Forget holding yarn double, here Extreme Knitter Rachel John knits a mattress using 1,000 strands held together. The only points to this, presumably, being the ones at the ends of her needles.

More of a point here - hideously annoying background music, but this does use knitting (or rather unknitting) to make illustrate the potential effects of climate change rather well.

You've probably already seen this a million times, but here are the Mason-Dixon Knitters with "Pardon Me (I Didn't Knit That For You)", which is pretty funny though I wouldn't expect a non-knitter to find that much amusement in it, or at least, not more than once.

To wrap up, news of something I'm very excited about: there's a film coming out in February of Neil Gaiman's "Coraline"! That in itself would be great (but scary), but even better, it's a 3D stop-motion animation (inherently cool) and has plenty of craft content. I mean, buttons for eyes and all... The trailer is here on the film's website and certainly worth a look, but I shall embed here for you a short film about the person who made the incredible minature knitwear for the puppets.

Enjoy!

Being a good girl, for once

I spent today at the O2 Arena in Greenwich, formerly known as the Millennium Dome, at a professional conference - the same one I went to at Lord's last year. Actually, this one was in the excruciatingly-named IndigO2, a mini-venue inside the massive tent. The size of the damn thing never fails to amaze me.

As it happened, who should be playing there tonight?

This meant we had to endure an extremely lame crack by one of the speakers about the economy being "even more depressing than Leonard Cohen". Weak.

Furthermore, one of my fellow delegates had a spare ticket going. And was willing to sell it for less than the £75 (ouch!) face value. And I already at the venue so wouldn't have had to trek across London to get there...

But I took a deep breath, put my sensible hat on, and declined, for a number of very good reasons:

• Tonight was a gym night not a going out night. I've lost a stone so far in the attempt to look better in the wedding photos, and those calories won't burn themselves.
• Given our over-exuberance with booking entertainment for said wedding, I really shouldn't spend the money, even at less than face value. Hell, what with the depressing economy and the sinking of the pound to only $1.50 for the first time in years, I've just decided I mustn't buy any more yarn from the States (or anything else in dollars) for the foreseeable future. I shouldn't buy concert tickets either, even in sterling.
• I actually saw Mr Cohen on Tuesday night this week, in Bournemouth, my home town. He was brilliant, of course. He is a god. This wouldn't have been half as good, being in the cavernous O2, and on my own as it was only a single seat on offer (I don't mind going to concerts alone as such, but wasn't up for doing so tonight). The show in Bournemouth was amazing, he did "The Partisan" this time so there was even singing in French, and our seats in the BIC were even closer than at Manchester. I didn't take my camera though.
• Oh yes, and because I vowed earlier in the year that I would never set foot in the O2 again for a concert, because it is so horrible. Back on that blog entry, I even said that I would not go back there, even for Leonard Cohen. Mind you, that was before he was touring, when I thought he never would again. Still, I do keep my word.

As an aside, the person offering the ticket has seen Mr Cohen twenty times this year, so far. And you think I'm obsessed?! Even though I've seen R.E.M. another three times since I last blogged about them (Southampton, Twickenham and Copenhagen over the summer), that only makes 18 in my whole life. I'm jealous, of course.

So I headed off home to the delights of sitting on the exercise bike watching MTV. However I did stop to purposefully walk back and forth across the Prime Meridian a few times:

I have photos, not yet blogged, of me doing much the same on the Equator in Quito, back in May, and I have a small sense of satisfaction at having been to both zeros in one year. I would like to go to 0,0, just to say I've been, but that seems to be somewhere off the coast of Nigeria so I think it's unlikely any time soon. Instead I am now sat at home listening to a bootleg of the Manchester concert and only just regretting not taking that ticket...

Enter Sandman

Last week's photoshoot (and thank you for the lovely comments) was all about getting the camera settings ready for Halloween. We didn't go to Torture Garden like last year, but we did go somewhere that was equally fitting of serious dressing up. It was another White Mischief night, as we've been to before, but smaller than the others as it was at 33 Portland Place, a small mansion/private party venue in Bloomsbury (with a bad reputation - there was a police drugs raid when we were there!), rather than in a big club. The theme was "The House of The Sandman", but the original German version by ETA Hoffmann, which is much nastier than the sanitised version we get these days, like most of the Brothers Grimm stories. Here's the relevant quote from the story:

“He is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won’t go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.”

As such, one of the suggested dressing-up themes was "eyeless bodies", and that's what I chose to go with, getting some black-out contact lenses for the occasion (not the full-sclera ones though, those are incredibly expensive), fake blood, and a new corset - any excuse, right? In the 20 minutes we had to wait for our cab, the boyfriend took rather a lot of pictures of me, and this being an entirely narcissistic post (and blog), I shall present them here:

He's a clever boy with a camera, isn't he?  Everybody kept saying I looked really young wearing the lenses.  I'm not sure why that would be.

I don't have any good pictures of the evening itself, as the boyfriend was shooting film (old skool!) and it's not developed yet, and I took my smaller camera on the basis that it fits in my handbag, but it truly is shit in low-light conditions, so all my photos are shaken to buggery. I'll put them up though, so you get the general idea.

Me and the boyfriend, who went as Wee Willie Winkie, "sleepwalkers" being another recommended theme:

Me and Mrs Lovett, aka Gail, complete with meat pies:

A rather sexy older man with a gravelly voice and marvellous dusty grey wings. I told him he was like Leonard Cohen will be when he dies and goes to heaven - if only I wasn't spoken for...

Smokers on the patio, photographed because I really wish this many people wore hats in everyday life:

The Sawchestra, there being rather a lot of saws being played that night:

Burlesque performers, one as the devil, one as a ballerina in a hooped skirt:

The Puppini Sisters, who are fairly famous but I thought they were rubbish, but they only did three songs anyway:

And actually even more rubbish was Death doing a pastiche of Bjork's "It's Oh So Quiet":

Our hosts, the band formerly known as Kunta Kinte, now called Tough Love. They're pretty good and they did a cover of Metallica's "Enter Sandman". Rock on!

I actually didn't get a photo of by far the best band of the night, The Dead Victorians. Check out their songs on their Myspace page - genius. So much so that we're trying to book them for the wedding. This is rather indulgent because we already have the awesome Southern Tenant Folk Union booked, but hell, we may as well make this a music festival while we're at it, and some risque songs from men in top hats will go down very well indeed.

Unexpected visits by the Metropolitan Police notwithstanding, the organisation wasn't great - the hideously overpriced bar even ran out of alcohol by just after midnight, and we all called it a night just after 1am. Better to leave early when the going's still good, in my opinion. Sadly I have no scheduled dressing up occasions this side of Christmas now, but I'm sure I can find one if I look hard enough...

P.S. Here's the official photographer's shot of us, and here are the police!

Hope vs Experience

This is not about tomorrow's US election, despite the concepts of the title being rather hijacked in recent months. I don't really want to blog about politics, particularly those of a country not my own - in many ways it's none of my damn business. Which isn't to say I don't have an opinion or indeed a strong preference; I just doubt my blog will be well served by discussing it. All I will say to any US readers is: please go out and vote. Not only did people die to give you a vote, not only is it your civic duty, not only do you have no right to complain if you don't bother, but it would just be nice this time if whoever does get in has a proper, undisputed mandate to lead. Don't worry, I'll be saying exactly the same thing whenever we get round to having an election over here. Sermon over.

What prompted the title was actually this rather touching piece of graffiti in the loos of London's Astoria II music venue:

If you can't read it, and there wasn't much I could do to make it clearer, it says "Florence *heart* LIAM 4 EVA (HOPEFULLY)". Doesn't that just speak volumes? Florence, poor girl, clearly likes Liam very much, but she's so painfully aware that these things don't always work out. Perhaps things haven't gone so well so far.  I don't even want to dive into the psychological depths of why she's done her name in lowercase.  Fingers crossed for you, unknown lovers.

We were at the Astoria to see a band with rather a lot of experience: Kill Hannah. They've been around since the early 90's, but really only got famous on the recent emo bandwagon. I'd never heard of them until the boyfriend got tickets, but it's always fun to go along to something completely different, if only for crowd watching. Emo kids are so funny, after all. And kids it was - they were all so young! I mean, seriously, even the lead singer referred to them needing fake IDs to get in, which makes them mid teens, it's not just me feeling my age. Given he, underneath his Robert Smith-style hair and makeup, is 34, it was rather disturbing to watch the teen girls who could easily have been his daughters scream and squeal, desperately wanting to be the "crazy angel" or the "girl with lips like morphine" of the best-received tracks. Apparently knicker-throwing is not uncommon. The tour (and the album they're plugging) is called "Hope for the Hopeless" and I really do hope that's the case with those groupies. Many of their parents were waiting patiently outside in the cold to collect them, and I doubt they'd want their daughters breaking their hearts over him.

In case you're wondering, and it seems this the most common question they get, Hannah was a girl who the singer briefly dated who then dumped him. He retaliated by naming his then-new band "Kill Hannah". Apparently she knows and doesn't mind. The boyfriend and I have several possibilities between us over the years for a popular beat combo to be named "______ _______ is a Fucking Bitch", but sadly we both lack the musical talent to make it to the big time, and it really would only be a decent riposte if we managed to get to the top of the charts. The second most frequent question for Kill Hannah is, he said, "What's your proudest moment?" He claimed it was playing the Astoria that night. We were sceptical. It was a cold Wednesday night in a tiny venue by Tottenham Court Road. But that and the other over-emotional hyperbole from the stage seemed to go down well with the kids. Shame his speaking voice is so much like Michael Jackson's...

They were very good, though. I'm not dissing their music. I had a great time!

Oh, and it seems black fingerless gloves are absolutely de rigeur for an emo. Must knit some, because whilst I'm not an emo, I do think they look wicked cool.

Bandwagon

Even more knitting spilling over into mainstream culture this week. On Friday morning, the illustrious Today Programme on Radio 4 deigned to notice that it is becoming quite popular again "recently". They aren't half slow! Interviewees were knitwear designer Lise-Lotte Lystrup and the guy whose company runs the Knitting & Stitching Shows (including Ally Pally, which isn't far off). There's an article about it here, and the interview itself can be played about halfway down the page.

However, whilst I was pleased to hear my dear hobby on that bastion of radio programming as I was ironing my office clothes, and in fact was very late to work because of it, I did get annoyed enough with Evan Davies to start shouting at the radio. No, this is not because of the credit crunch, not everything is, even though as ex-economics correspondent you probably think it should be. I'm afraid, Evan, that this resurgence does slightly predate the recent market troubles. And as you hopefully now know, it's not exactly money-saving.

Annoyance on Friday turned to horror on Saturday as I saw this travesty of a shop window in Covent Garden:

That's Diesel, who have clearly employed a marketing department who have heard one phrase only about knitting, and don't feel the need to look it up to see how it's spelled. Actually, I've just Google searched "knit and pearl" and there are 2.36m hits, which is worrying, compared to less than 1m for "knit and purl".  Or am I the one who's getting it wrong, along with all of Ravelry and the blogosphere?

Anyway, they've even got their own branded wool for the window. I'd be impressed, if I hadn't been so irritated in the first place.

Not that my tolerance was up to much yesterday, seeing as we'd been to Shunt the night before and I was suffering badly with the after-effects of too much cheap red wine, only mitigated by enough paracetamol to run the risk of even more liver damage.

Bad Lucy. Shunt was as amusing as ever. What did we have there this week?

An enchanted forest at the entrance:

Followed by an astonishingly photo-real and erotic series of portraits of a woman undressing herself, through her hoop skirts and corset (in fact called "The Fear of Falling" by Sophie Lewis and Emma Critchley):

Crazy Japanese kids Yes-Yes-5638 programming noise-art, and no PCs allowed evidently:

The KissBox - put your blindfolded heads in here...

...and start snogging for the whole bar to watch on live feed:

(And no, I didn't, though we did have some amusing discussions on how popular and ergonomically feasible BlowJobBox and DVDABox would be.)

Pinball Geoff was back:

Including table football in the dark:

Water pistol-wielding ninjas policing hygiene in the loo - they even gave me a mint imperial:

I may have been drunk whilst trying to take this self-portrait:

Best of all, awesome Mongolians! Playing fantastic music!

They are called Hanggai and are over here for the Thames Festival this weekend (to which I utterly failed to go, even to Johnny Woo's cabaret). They were utterly rocking and the crowd loved them. I mean, seriously, holy crap they were good. If only we could book them for the wedding...

Look at his shoes!  And go listen to their stuff on Myspace!

And finally, a complete WTF moment walking around Soho:

The website is even more baffling.

Oh, and we're not dead yet! Hooray for CERN!