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August 20, 2004
Team-up Ish
[Accompanying images start here.]
There aren't many people more disposed by default to unsociability and misanthropy than eleutheria and I. Which makes this even more ridiculous, cos this sadly-too-short walk ("This one has it all, thrill-seekers! Undercurrent, Heronbone, Eleutheria, K-Punk team up issue!") was great, and it's a rare and joyful thing to meet up with genuine people you can instantly get on with, who make you laugh and who are furthermore a thoroughly good spinozan influence. I realised that I had an uninterrogated irrational expectation that hb would actually _talk_ like on his blog, but I got over that, it would probably be a bit disturbing, that, wouldn't it ;). It's weird meeting someone who you only know through blogs though, because it's not that you've met the 'real' person, more that the real-virtual entity has spawned a weird twin in the physical world so it's a double bonus really.
Met on the Greenway with k-punk reciting the by-now-legendary story of his stealth-kidnap that morning by a malevolent blind delusional pensioner ('Douglas can't do it, he's giving a massage.'). Past Bazalgette's pumping station picking blackberries, down a sideroute where the scummy water stank of rot and detergent. Power-up at spinozist nomad cafe at Three Mills : how little do you need to make a caff ? A mini tea machine, a couple of packets of crisps, and a paper plate with "two types of cheese and a leek" on it . Watching the dislocated Soho media types and the swans, two white and one black, evidently evil satan-swan with its striped red beak constantly half-open in a display of cosmic dinosaur-brain contempt for humanity. None of them ate the wotsits.
Down the Limehouse Cut down past where we used to live (the whole canal here still in the process of being lined by identical sandstone-orange and powder-blue bankerdorms) and halfway down to Limehouse Basin the Courvoisier came out, most welcome. At the Basin there was one huge fat silver fish that wriggled awkwardly across the expanse of water in a bid to find sanctuary under a pier. A cormorant had a go but I think that sucker was too big. Then we sat in a pub with the swelling Thames spitting at the windows, atrocious music on the jukebox and Damien Hirst's spotty tate boat motoring up and down outside. Reading HB's birthday insect book and the corpulocracy's* in-house paper 'The Wharf - Canary' Wharf's Exclusive Weekly Paper', surely edited and co-written by Alan Partridge himself (star columnist 'Concrete Pencil - "looking at life from a desk in the sky" "Board Stupid - Wharfer to cycle Monopoly circuit in mad charity stunt") and replete with mugshots of piganautical check-shirted financiobloaters ('A Barclays capital worker was the victim of an attempted mugging as he championed the Conservative Party's Isle of Dogs crime crackdown' ROFL!) The pub's pricelist had a fine display of "cafe punctuation", still a mysterious form to me (Why not try some "champagne" , or a red wine from ("france") ?)
It's only sad that we made the mistake of curtailing this for the sake of a franco-fuzzed discussocratic* ponderama D&G too-much-reading group, from fresh air to suffocating fuzzfug (had k-punk and I flipped over into a katak-affect >>yes luke we take it all back, it _is_ all a load of fuzzy bourgeois dross let's throw that shit out the window<<). But I did get to meet infinite thought and glueboot, not to mention Ray B 'Dark Prince of Cold Rationalism'.
So hopefully we'll do it again soon and don't be silly. [also, Photos coming soon but you'd better advise me whether you or Ben object to me blowing your cover and showing everyone what you look like (people, luke is actually a 47-yr-old red-faced bald management consultant)]
Today we went to the Horniman museum and saw hundreds of creatures both stuffed and alive ('Our catfish like to sleep at funny angles. They are not sick or dead') This is what a museum should be, none of that interactive rubbish, proper wood and glass cases with handwritten labels.
[* mark k-punk is banned until further notice from coining any neologism ending in 'cratic']
Posted by robin at August 20, 2004 03:26 PM
Comments
ben's a handsome fella, try and find a pic with me looking more dashing than he does. looking rumpled and disreputable but sexy, with a wicked gleam in the eye. failing that, try one where i at least dont look like a nobhead.
i'm glad you weren't as bored as i thought you were. we went to the pub and got drunk. i could have told you that would be a better use of your time. you might not have heeded my advice.
Posted by: luke at August 21, 2004 01:00 AM