clown and pout #2

August 10th, 2004

Fit the Third: In which I mine for gold, and then put on a show right here in the barn.
We’re at 12 Bar on Denmark Place. Tam buys me a bacon roll and we try to spot the lizards David Icke warned us about in his book. It looks like we’re pretty safe, though (‘ware Buck Palace! HP Sauce and Golly Badges, by cold-blooded appointment to the Queen! Skill 9, Stamina 10!).
Johny points out the church where (I imagine) Link learned the Song of Time. It looks onto a popular night-time methadone hotspot (like the zombies in Hyrule Market), and various places where the Sex Pistols used to hang out.

We have a look through the books that Johny and Tam have brought for the show. Tam and Claudine will pluck bits out and create a quasi-dialogue over a leftfieldy backdrop… like Blue Jam, to the untrained ear. I would hate to clip the angel’s wings, so listen for yourself: 1-2pm Fridays, www.resonancefm.com for details. The highlight for me is the very nice violinist, who makes wond’rous noises with his violin, and then with ministrations from the same bow coaxes beautiful swansong from a crippled acoustic guitar – before it is enthusiastically beaten to death by Johny.
And now it is time to meet Log and Scott at the French House. The wonderful Francis Bacon loved this place. I love this place. Victor Lewis-Cunting-Smith loves this place. Around eighteen years ago, at a house party he was holding, and in colourful ten-year-old protest against the standard of his a) writing in “Private Eye” b) hair, I decimated his jelly-bean machine, and then pranked his buzzer three or four times with satisfactory results. I will tell you about this some time: I want to tell him first. I didn’t get the chance this time.
Log’s book is being launched next month. Order one: it’s only about sixpence ha’penny. I organised this “do” chiefly for the people who contributed to the book and its website (although I also invited my dearest college chums). We accumulate online occasionally to call one another cunts, and earlier this year accumulated face-to-face, and so enjoyed calling one another cunts “IRL” that we now can’t get enough of one another. And so Mr & Mrs Log and I find ourselves alarming a gentleman in a white panama hat with our scatological anecdotes and with the shaggy dog tale of Log’s nan’s pea-fetishist poodle. There’s a phrase which would slip nicely into the shipping forecast.
Then we find Nick and Ben, in a pub which looked like a ferry. There is a toy on our table! Toy, toy, we found a toy! Still in its box and everything. Oriental logos add to the mystery. Imagine our dismay when a lady tells us it belongs to her son. She points him out. He is in his thirties and working a solitaire machine as though it were Orlando Bloom in a minidress. He probably needs his toy more than we do, so we reluctantly yield it (but we found it first!).
The next thing I know, I am upstairs at Monkey Chews. It is a lot like Mulholland Drive up there, from the interior decor to my daze. Dark wood, reddish candle light, distant ceiling, a Bayeux crapestry of NME heroes up the wall. In no time I am surrounded by several young gentlemen, at least a baker’s dozen at any given point, of whom I am extremely fond. What can I do but put “Toxic” on the “wheels of steel”, and try to hug them all at once? I feel sort of like the Queen Alien and sort of like Robin Hood. DoyouknowwhatImean? There is a mild fracas at one point, but the general mood is… well, look at the photos. I feel a little naked at the decks without a pair of headphones, but on the bonus side that leaves me free to dash about excitably. FourFootVauxhallCarlton is amusing Matt and me with a surprisingly funny monologue on Simon Weston. Slab Ghost is patrolling the room looking very pleased with himself. Tony from Kash Point has arrived, bless him, and is making my wallflower college chums feel at home. Aktualy he is urging them to try out Torture Garden, but they seem to be taking it in their stride. Even I don’t want to go to Torture Garden, and I have a dark side, you know? I have an “Emily” wristband, and I once said guns were “sexy”.
I don’t know if I’m doing another “fit”. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you didn’t all think it was for real, and run screaming and wrist slashing onto the streets like when Orson did “War of the Worlds”.