Yves Klein Blue: 2009

I started keeping a journal
here is some of it
there will be more installments soon
m,t

Big Ben Free Beer Boy George Supergrass 16/10/2009
Yesterday I walked up Old Street and got off at Green Park and did all this tourist shit like look at Buckingham Palace and Big Ben and the changing of the guards and shit. It was really great. Seriously, nobody is too cool to run around with a camera. Succumb to the desire to behave like the manifest annoying moron. Do it in your home town. Photograph your cat. Or your leg.
Anyway that takes about five hours. Then I’m walking home past Hoxton Square and I see a big crowd of people so I ask what’s happening and one guy tells me it’s on account of all the free beer they are giving away. At that exact moment I realize everyone is drinking Asahi. I feel God everywhere.
It’s a trap you see, for the art gallery across the way is opening and they want to con me, but I’m to smart for that so I willingly participate knowing that the course of all action is inevitable. I drink two beers.
Inside is magnificent, impressively sized landscapes highly texturised. Then someone taps me on the shoulder and I ignore my navy training a forgo fly kicking the owner of the tapping hand into the stratosphere because that behavior could lead to court marshal in a civilian situation. Anyway I’m glad I don’t because it’s Dave form Pivot and he and two other lovely gals (Sarah and Claire) wisk me away to another gallery opening of a fellow named Lucas which is even better than the last and there is more free beer.
Then we see that Boy George is there. He is defiantly checking me out. Claire gets a picture with him.
Hugh shows up with Jess and we eat the Muffin and Chelsea Bun that Sarah gave me for dinner. Chelsea buns rule – they are like Hot Cross Buns on steroids. Then we decide to see if there is any beer left at the other gallery as there is proximate to us on account of we drank it all.
(I wonder about the irony of handing out lucrative amounts of alcohol at a fine art exhibit. It seems to completely justify being brutally hung over at every major gallery in Paris last week.)
No beer left at Hoxton Square either so we settle for buying one at the Bar and Kitchen. We’re sitting round when Jess exclaims that the guys playing in the main room look and sound astonishingly like Supergrass. So me and Hugh and like “Bullshit, you’re wrong woman” because we’re such jerks but it turns out she is right.
It is Supergrass.
Playing a COVERS SET all my favorite songs including ‘Queen Bitch’, ‘Love is the Drug’, ‘Love Cats’ and many more.
This is off the charts. I get excited and spend all my money on drinks. It is a blast. Afterwards Hugh gets a job and Alisha shows up. My pal McDeath does lights at the venue and gave me the tip off. I owe him a cd as I gave his one to Garry. THE Garry. From Supergrass.
Then I came home and recounted these events.
Which are, in abridged précis –
Big Ben, Free Beer, Boy George, Supergrass.
M,t

Fragrant . Hugh has fragrant breath.

the hot rats in all their glory
they played suffragette city
they rule

seconds before i was chained to the heater and made into a rose/george sandwich

sorry for the mental image
m,t

Watching Dancing Robots Slits as guest of The Chief Wookie 17/10/2009
The next day I’m in cost cutters buying ingredients for a fry up. It come to 13.99 which is think is fairly thrifty but not oo much because I’m not so good at being TOO thrifty. I don’t get a bang out it. I’m bad with restraint.
Anyhow – Chewy, Chief Wookie is on the phone with me and I’m enquiring about a graffiti exhibit we’re meant to be attending tonight. He says a whole bunch of stuff including fire breathing metal goth strippers in a rock band and dancing robots but the long and short of it is somewhere between the bransky pickle and the grapefruit juice he reveals the Slits are playing that night at ULU. So I resolve to go.
I show up at 8 and realize that while I can get my hip flask in I can’t take my soft drink into the toilet to get the flask into it so I have to take frequent trips. The first band are a called wet dog – chewy went to uni with the drummer who apparently had to follow a lesbian sex show in a wrestingly ring at fashion week with an troubadour set. They are good. The next band is Kasms they have a coupla good ones.
The SLITS RULE. They have dancing robots on stage. They play punk and reggae WELL. Really well. Tess the bass player had this sweet Vox bass with BC Rich-esque metal influenced art sprayed on it. The keyboard player is good looking. The lead singer has a bunch of dreadlocks bigger than my entire body possible and keeps taking off her clothes suggestively pouring water on her pubic mound.
Afterwards Chewy and I are enlisted in the backstage crew and carry the tremendously heavy (on Chewys end) robots down three flights of stairs. They are quite heavy, especially on Chewy’s end and I am petrified of breaking them. Luckily we succeed without incident and get them in the car.
At the foot of the stairs is a crowd including Dave (a stage man that I will meet again on new years eve) and Tess. I tell how wonderful I think she is a bass guitar. Then we head to 12 bar talking about Joe Strummer and Chewys car with Kevin and Vicki and the like.
12 Bar is in the city and it also rules. There is a punk band playing tunes like Ruby Soho and Tommy Gun in what is for all intents and purposes a cupboard when we come in and Rum and Corn Whiskey drinks are 2 pound. I withdraw my last 10 pound from a cash point and down a couple. We decide to head and run into Michelle (Guitar) and Anne (Drums) from the Slits who recognize me from our gig at Bloomsbury Bowls. I feel really really cool.
Then we end up going back to Chewys and watching YouTube and talking about. We end up inevitably at how things will ever get better for everyone and Chewy says - the only way to bridge the gap for past wrong doing is to show real faith in a disadvantaged person even if it may come back to smack you in the face – to be vulnerable to attack and give blindly (ie: ask the homeless guy to mind your bike) even though you may end up losing out. I believe him - am living proof because the kindness he showed to me made me feel a part of something, of the whole thing.
M,t

this is the chief wookie chewy with his beautiful girlfriend rose at a bar called the joiners during one of my first nights in london
i can't say enough good things about either of them
except that they are both heading to south america for christmas
and im totally jealous
bless

my close an personal friends the slits

and my robotic pals, pictured with dj bot

Four Horsemen 18/10/2009
I get home from all of the above at 7am so I go to bed until 3pm. Makes sense huh?
It is now Saturday and my pal Stuart has arrived. We take him down to Portobello Rd from Piccadilly Circus and make lots of terribly rude jokes about Tube stations in front of little children and don’t feel bad in the slightest.
We have beer, then a whole plate of food accompanied by chips. It just doesn’t get any better than that.
Then, once more the Chief Wookie has told me all about this thing called “Mutate”. It’s an art show held under a bridge near the markets. Tess tells me Mick Jones used to have a big studio or something round there. Anyhow he head down and it is simply INCREDIBLE. Everything is covered strange apocalyptic art work. There is graffiti like calligraphy with murals and frescos as well which Kevin did. Littered around on the earth were animals with scrap heap anatomy polished to shine platinum and incandescent. A helicopter lay wrecked and fortified in sinew with a wicked blade and lupine overbite – one amongst all these solemn and solitary monolithic dinosaurs. On one pedestal shaped like a bird, another canine. Serpentine stems of iron lit like Vegas and belching smoke and any other strange surreal thing you could imagine. There was another gallery inside with pictures hung in ornate frames to the ceiling but as you approached you realized these to were painted right onto the wall using spray cans like scalpel incision. My friends the dancing robots were there again and this time on of them was playing a DJ set. There were more strange poised metal beasts straining to break the solder that held their cogs still and ceramic spray cans for fascists and absolutely too many things to mention as well as what came.
The show begins. The huge monster in the courtyard whirs into life, a black clad man on it’s back revving it louder than a Harley Davidson and screaming. It’s eyes are flashing red and swiveling in their sockets and at the neck jet flames fire burst from it’s nostrils and erupt in huge torrents from its like a grand fountain. Its riders exposed skin is covered in grease and oil as is that of his fellow ‘soldiers’, for that is what they must be. Straight outta Hades Amazonian warrior women, one on stilts standing a clear body length above my head and one on foot – both with flame throwers throwing bursts of flame gutteral sceams like fire out into the cold night.
Needless to say everyone finds this very interesting. There begin to march this hellish parade and we follow them like the pied pipers rats. A girl is taken hostage and almost burned alive by the stilt woman warriors jealousy. JJ flirts with the one on stilts to some success. We all clamber through that incredible garden of steel blossoms and out onto the streets were the parade marches down Portobello Road unleashing their flame and war out into the rest of the world.
I thank Chewy emphatically for the tip off. All this in 3 days, l love London. Nobody seemed to mind that there was a giant mechanical monster and hellish warriors walking down the road in this place. What will happen next? I wonder if they had to get a license for them? Afterwards we found a bar with 2.50 everything so we have lots of cocktails. I turn bright red.
Anyway they might still be marching, on their way over to you. I can’t stop them so good luck. Makes you wonder what would happen if the four horsemen walked into town. I don’t know what would happen but one thing is for sure – I would take a lot of photographs.
M,t

Snails 19/10/2009
We go to Manchester for “In the City”. Nobody stays for our gig but everyone who is there seems to like it. We meet Emily and I arrange to have a haircut with her when next we’re in town. We stay with Will and Dan who we met in Adelaide. Ah the people you meet in Adelaide. I saw a group of women urinating on the wall of a bar three metres away from it’s entrance at 4 in the morning there once.
Stuart comes with and much later on we sneak out of Wills house and consume most of a large bottle and talk shit as it’s been a while.
Anyway he goes – “Hey, look, a snail.”
And I say “Yeah ok”
And he says “Wow, there are thousands of them”
And I say ‘whatever” but then I look down.
And he was right.
Thousands of snails slugs and crawlers were making their painstaking migration across the garden path so slowy and softly we didn’t even know. They surrounded us right underneath our noses leaving mercury jet trails on the red brick halls of Manchesters suburban streets.

here is stuart embracing the english diet

there are no photos of the slugs
they are too gross
GROSS!

Driving a Stick 20/10/2009
Today I won the cup for Man U, drove a the splitter and befriended a Chocolate Labrador while looking for authentic Devonshire tea service.
I stink and was duped into drinking Carlsberg (more like GHASTLYBERG) by a fast talking Indian on Brick Lane but the Vindaloo gave me heart palpitations so all is forgiven.
By Christmas I’m told I’ll be wearing Technicolor Doc Martins.
Can’t wait.
M,t