Poker Frustration @ Chandos Ave

Horribly frustrating night. Constantly betrayed by two pairs. I started with a couple of small wins, but then lost two big hands when I had two pairs, which is a decent enough hand, and there were certainly bigger pots being won with a lot less. I had to buy in before we ate at 21:00, but after that came back and was ahead again for a while. Then I failed to meet an all-in bet from Sanjay when I again had two pairs, and there was a potential straight on the board. He subsequently told me he was bluffing, and with a pot of £60 I could have ended the night well ahead.
My last two pair disaster was on the very last hand. It is customary on the last hand for everyone to see the flop to build the pot up.
I had:

So when this flop appeared:

I was looking OK. Matt was v.pissed (four cans of lager and a bottle of wine) and without looking at his cards bet £6. Most people folded at that point. I stayed in as did Gareth, who is normally very cautious so that should have tipped me off. The turn didn't bring anything very scary:





Then the river came up with:






Giving me another two pairs .I was pretty confident, as there was nothing much else on. Matt went all in (which was about £12) and Gareth and I matched him. Matt turned over:





I was chuffed until grinning Gareth showed his pocket pair:






Bloody Bastard Bollocks.





Meanwhile just around the corner:

Boss Cat

When I used to watch Top Cat as a wee pre-teen, I was always confused by the way that the newspaper listed the programme as Boss Cat, even though the main character was called Top Cat and the theme music was indesputably called Top Cat. During the opening of the show there was an obviously homemade title card which said 'Boss Cat' in a totally different type face to the rest of the credit sequence, which just looked wrong. I couldn't understand it at all, it nagged at my formative psyche for years. Eventually I found out that there was a conflict between a popular brand of cat food, also Called Top Cat, and the strict BBC policy of non-advertising. In a way I preferred the nagging lack of understanding, the mystery of the un-known rather than the humdrum reality.

Anyway here is the current Chandos Boss Cat strutting his funky stray cat stuff.

It's Not Only Rock'n'Roll

Billie and I went to see the Tom Stoppard play ‘Rock’n’Roll’ at the Duke of Yorks theatre last night. It’s a vastly ambitious piece, with a wealth of Stoppard's disparate fascinations thrown together seemingly randomly. So you get a history of Czechoslovakia from ’68-’90, a meditation on the musical obsessions of an anglophile Czech student, ruminations on the ancient Greek lyric poetry of Sappho, debates about communism, espionage, love, loyalty and betrayal. All overseen by the spectral presence/absence of Syd Barret. It would have been all too easy for this intellectual hotch potch to have turned into an utterly confusing mess, but Stoppard overlays his concerns onto the solid dramatic foundation of A Story (Wow!): i.e. The tale of the developing relationships within three generations of an academic family in Cambridge. It’s the sympathetic nature of these generational observations that allows the catherine wheel of ideas to stay pinned to the tree.


The performances of Brian Cox and Rufus Sewell were exceptional, quite possibly the best I’ve ever seen, and there was more than able support from the rest of the cast especially Sinead Cusack. The challenge of fitting in so many scenes in different places/times was met by the use of a clever revolving stage, and the device of lowering a screen between scenes. Onto which was projected the recording details of the music that was played. This included Syd Barrett, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and even a dodgy ballad by Guns’n’Roses. I found this slightly confusing, as the songs didn’t fit into the chronology of the play, so in the early ‘80’s a track from The Beachboys recorded in 1966 was played? Ah! musical pedantry how sweet thou art. Still, didn't detract from an excellent evening.

Take My Eyes And Through Them See You

ICA membership has a few perks, one of which is that you get invited along to members veiws of new exhibitions before they open. Sadly they all seem to take place at 6.30 on Tuesday evenings, and are thus impossible to attend. This months invite was also on a Tuesday but didn't start 'til late so thought we may as well give it a go.


Described in the blurb as '...a new set of works in response to the history, location and architechtural particularities of the ICA'. This in fact consisted of Cerith Wyn Evans (sounds a bit Welsh to me, isn't it) having removed the false internal wall of the lower gallery, revealing some windows which looked out onto The Mall. That was it. Nothing in the gallery, just a lack of wall....There was a talk by the curator trying to put the 'work' in context, but the feedback from the floor was very much 'Emperors New Clothes', though a few youngsters seemed a little more enthused.

I'd met up with Hywel and Malcolm earlier in the day, as they've brought the boat back up to London for its winter mooring, and really it would have been a far more entertaining evening supping real ale in some canalside pub that witnessing this twaddle.

My Mother Should Know

I'd almost forgotten I used to mess about with these photo-montage thingies, and now, thanks to those nice people at You Tube, you can wish that I really had forgotten.

Cat-Sitting Batman..

While the new cat (commonly referred to as 'Little Cat') was recovering from his bout of cat-flu, and before he could be introduced to Pud, we were spending lots of time in the spare room with him trying to get him used to human company. A lot of the time he spends cowering under the sofa, so it's only natural for ones eyes to shift to the walls of books.

While struggling to read anything novel sized at the moment I have managed to get through a number of the Batman graphic novels which have been sitting on the shelf for a couple of years, following a particularly virulent eBay epidemic a while back.

Quality is variable, but the best of them are actually intelligently put together and genuinely explore the psychology of the misunderstood outsider, and the inner struggles between dark and light. What keeps you ploughing through even the dodgy ones are the recurrent mythological events and characters, that are always recycled in slightly different ways. There is a definite warmth of recognition as all of the pieces gradually fall into place - boy's wealthy parents killed in front of him/confused search for revenge/apocalyptic bat-shaped enlightenment /arrival of nemesis/final conflict and catharsis/recurring sense of doubt and doom.

If only there was an OU course available on this stuff I may be able to kick my endless gap year.

The Perils Of Penelope

Went to see the new Pedro Almodovar film last night at The Watermans. Jen had been over all day trying to print some stuff out for her sociology course, and ordering text books etc... and she expressed an interest in coming along, but her considered judgement: 'it was a bit shit' suggested she may have preferred to spend the evening in some other way.

She wasn't far wrong though, apart from Penelope Cruz, who was excellent and managed to ooze seductive Spanishness, the plot was fairly insipid (could have been a story line from Emmerdale) and everytime she was off screen the film dragged. Indeed it was way too long, and needed to have at least 20 minutes shaved off it. Many of Almodovar's best films have been female ensemble pieces, and he obviously enjoys that set up, but where he has previously displayed a wacky deftness of touch, this was just ponderous.

The Rise And Fall Of The Fall

Val was up for the weekend and as a special 'treat' we'd got her a ticket to see The Fall who were playing at The Galtymore Club in Cricklewood. The Galtymore is an old style chicken-in-a-basket Irish club that has played host to Daniel O'Donnell in the past and forthcoming attractions include Finbarr & The Glensiders and Declan Nerney. As such is was a perfect venue for the fractious Fall. Things got off to a bad start as I was nominated to drive and got onto the wrond dual carriageway by mistake. We then spent several hours driving through most of the back streets of Harlesden before finally coming to rest on Cricklewood 'The Lights are always bright on...' Broadway. We were supposed to meet up with Matthew Wigglesworth, another old friend of Billie's, and long term Fall fan, but because we were so late we went straight to the Galty and caught The Snarls, a snotty bunch of Mancs, who tried a bit too hard to be aggressively disinterested. More of a Cliff Richard lip curl than a snarl...

Next up was John Cooper Clark, who I thought I may have seen a long time ago, but maybe not, he is similar vintage to The Fall, and was very very funny, best stand up since Bill Bailey. Here's a hiaku he did:
TO-CON-VEY ONE'S MOOD
IN SEV-EN-TEEN SYLL-ABLE-S
IS VE-RY DIF-FIC

Stick thin, and dressed in black with wispy backcombed hair he looked exactly the same as he did 30 years ago, close up he looked a little more haggered, not bad for an ex-Heroin addict of 57 though.

The last time I saw The Fall was back in 1981 at the Milky Way club in Amsterdam. A bunch of us just happened to be there, and found out they were on. They were at their peak then and had sort of settled into the line-up that would be fairly constant for the next decade - including of course Mark Riley (aka Lard). There have been over 50 members of the band since then, and it was no surprise when Mark E. Smith sacked the last version of The Fall in the middle of an American tour earlier in the year. Amazingly he managed to find some replacements and finished the tour, and it was this Americanised version of the band that took the stage last night. They were actually very tight and disciplined - not The Fall I remember - and were supplemeted by Mark's current Yoko/Linda; Elena Poulou, a cute young Romanian girl on keyboards. Musically it was recognisabley Fallesque, primitive, repeated rockabilly style beats, with totally indecipherable rants from Smith over the top. He used to be audible, but now is just a tuneless slur. I didn't know any of the songs which didn't help, that is apart from a grungy cover of I Can Hear The Grass Grow, but I was troubled by Smith the whole evening. Why was he still doing this, was he enjoying it (didn't look like it) did he still have any faith, any belief in the music (didn't feel like it). I think it's just become what he does, it's a job, a vocation. I guess it's good that some 50 year old piss head can still command this much respect (the place was heaving) but his sour demeanour and his annoying habit of changing the volume and tone settings of the guitar amps, randomly thumping his mike on the keyboard, or kicking the drums, seemed just a childish display of showing who's boss, rather than some kind of controlled sonic experimentation. I've wanted to see The Fall again for ages, and this was as good a setting as I could hope for, but I'll remember more fondly my first sighting of The Fall, a bunch of greasy haired teenagers, dressed in their C&A jumpers who turned up at The Stowaway in Newport back in 1978. Still very much a band, with Smith as the singer rather than dictator, they had already perfected the funny, literate and impassioned, angular outsider racket that MES has been re-hashing ever since, but there was a hint of genius about them then, and sadly there's more of a hint of fraud about them these days.

Borderline

Picked Billie up last night, after her stint at Harley Street and went out for din-dins. I'd seen a couple of likely places on the walk from Ox Circ, a nice mews pub, and a funky new establishment called Mash which had it's own brewery on site. However the menus at both were piss poor so we chanced upon this place:


Quite the grooviest little spot I've seen in many a long year, with a huge mish-mash of retro fixtures and fittings, glittery chandeliers and Chinese silk collaged wallpaper....It's always worth walking out of somewhere if you think you deserve better.



They even had a 2 course prix fixe happy hour, so we had ginormous tiger prawns, and baked cod with the stickiest sticky rice available this side of the Uhu canteen. Billie then beat a hasty retreat, and I proceeded in the bucketing rain to the Borderline to see Charlotte Greig again who was supporting James Yorkston.



The three guitar line-up worked better indoors where you could hear all of the instruments, rather than the weak and weedy sound at the Green Man. Cotton Crown was especially nice, and at the end sounded like it wanted to segue into I'll Be Yor Mirror. Next up was Fionn Regan, who had also played the Green Man, but had been missed by all. I thought he was excellent, but everyone else thought him too rocky (because he had bass and drums). There was a bit of a Libertinesesque edge to his accoustic ditties, and by the look of some of the trendier elements of the audience (skinny white boys in tight white jeans, string vest, leather jacket casually hung over the shoulder, and checked flat cap at jaunty angle) he may be being eyed up as the new Pete Doherty (only with talent). The songs on his Myspace page don't really have the same edge they had live. Definately worth looking out for if he comes your way.

This was the second of two nights that James Yorkston was playing at the Borderline, last night he'd been accompanied by his band, but tonight he was mainly solo acoustic. After a while he was joined by a young female violinist, and later on a harpist too, but I just didn't think his songs, or his voice, offered enough variety to hold ones attention through the 90 minutes he intended to play. I skipped out after an hour claiming early night required to prepare for first thing in the a.m. driving lesson.

Notorious?

Went to see The Notorious Bettie Page at the Watermans this evening. My comment at the end was "What was that for?". It was all very competently filmed and acted, but was a fairly straight forward linear bio-pic, and if you aren't going to use the events of someone's life to make some kind of point, or tease out some historical significance then why bother?



She was portrayed as a total innocent, which just didn't ring true either. At the end she acheived some kind of corny enlightenment, and was reborn as a bible punching evengelist. Maybe that's what actually happened but it was portrayed in a really postitive light, which I found offensive. Give me Bondage over Communion any day. The director Mary Harron made a film called "I shot Andy Warhol", which didn't fall into the same traps as this, in that it focussed on a specific incident (Andy's shooting by a rabid feminist) rather than a simple run through of Warhol's life, so I was disappointed that she could have turned a potentially fascinating subject like this into something quite dull.

Still there was some nice vintage black and white footage of NY used, which I think is what resulted in the rest of the film also being shot in a very grainy b&w. This was with the exception of a few sequences, usually accompanied by some kitch 50's syrupy song, which were shot in ultra-vibrant technicolor. This made a really nice contrast to the rather drab grey tones of the rest of the film as the colour sequences really exploded onto the screen. Never mind we're going to see the new Almodovar next week, which looks V. good.

Queen Wing

As featured in this weekends Guardian magazine....



..one of several quirky pictures of British comedians. They had the best gags too:

What do you call a Frenchman in sandals? Philippe Flop.

What did the Scotsman do with the trumpet he found in his vegetable patch? He rooted it toot.

Indefinite Crap Storage

Don't know how I got hold of this, or why I kept it or how it managed to survive? But as a tribute to the staying power of this plucky little snippet, I hereby bequeath it to cyberspace:

Blue hat for a blue day

Try one on for size here...

Ooooh Baby Baby

Adam and Pauline were flying off to Sardinia early on Saturday morning so came over on Friday night so they could stay over and get to Heathrow in the early hours without too much trouble. Toby and Swati came too, with the new boy Dhillon (still not 100% sure of spelling).



A fine family night in was had by all. I thought Adam might take it easy and have an early night, but he was already in holiday mode, and couldn't retire before making sure all bottles had been fully emptied before hitting the sack.

Dhillon was very well behaved and had an angelic little nap on the sofa.